Pine Island

Pine Island is on U.S. Highway 90 eleven miles west of Beaumont in northern Jefferson County. The original location was two miles north, nearer Pine Island Bayou and Thomas D. Yocum's grant at the site of present Westbury. In 1839 Yocum secured the Pine Island post office which, although subsequently discontinued, operated again from 1849 to 1867. Post-Civil War repairs to the Texas and New Orleans Railroad between Houston and Orange rendered the line increasingly important to southeast Texas. By 1888 maps showed Pine Island on the railroad south of the original location. The Pine Island post office was reopened in 1904 and discontinued again in 1912. A few scattered buildings and residences, including a Texas A&M agricultural experiment station concentrating on rice horticulture, marked the Pine Island area in the mid-1980s. In 1990 the population was 350. The population remained the same in 2000.