Kickapoo

Kickapoo was on the east side of the Trinity River near the site of the present-day junction of U.S. Highway 190 and Farm Road 3152, ninety miles north of Houston in western Polk County. A community of settlers was there by 1846. They named the site for a group of Kickapoo Indians that often camped there on their treks from Northeast Texas to the Gulf of Mexico. The only group of Indians to actually settle permanently in the area were the Pakana Muskogees. Samuel Rowe and W. B. P. Gaines laid out the town in 1853. Their plot also included Patrick's Ferry, which had been operated by Isham T. Patrick and James Abbey as early as 1834. The community served as a Trinity River landing but lost much of its importance with the coming of the railroads to East Texas in the late 1870s. Although another community was established a mile away from the original settlement during the first quarter of the twentieth century, the Kickapoo post office, established in 1919, was discontinued sometime after 1930. The population dwindled from 100 in the early 1940s to an estimated forty by the latter part of that decade. Lists of towns dated 1949 do not include Kickapoo. The old townsite now lies under the waters of Lake Livingston, a man-made reservoir completed in 1968.