Jasper County

Jasper County is located in Southeast Texas, bordered on the north by San Augustine and Sabine counties, on the east by Newton County, on the south by Orange County, and on the west by Hardin and Tyler counties. The county seat, Jasper, is 115 miles northeast of Houston and twenty-three miles west of the Sabine River and Louisiana. The center of the county lies at approximately 94°00' west longitude and 31°41' north latitude. The county was named for William Jasper, a hero of the American Revolution who was killed attempting to plant the American colors at the storming of Savannah in 1779. Jasper County comprises 907 square miles of East Texas timberlands, with elevations ranging from 25 to 400 feet above sea level. The terrain along the northern border and southern third of the county is undulating to rolling, with loamy or sandy surface layers and reddish mottled clay or loamy subsoils. The rest of the county is generally flat, with the grayish, cracking-clay soils of the Trinity River floodplain and the reddish loamy soils of the Red River floodplain. Water is plentiful in the county; the average annual rainfall is fifty-two inches. Principal water sources include Sam Rayburn Reservoir, Lake B. A. Steinhagen, the Neches River (which forms the county's western boundary), and the Angelina River. Temperatures range from an average high of 93° F in July to an average low of 37° in January; the average growing season lasts 229 days. Resources include abundant timber, oil, and natural gas. The timber is mixed pine and hardwood.

Early inhabitants of the area that is now Jasper County were prehistoric hunters who camped near streams and rivers and moved about frequently in search of game. By the sixteenth century, when Spanish travelers first entered the region, Atakapa Indians lived in the southern sections of what later became Jasper County, and Indians of the Caddo confederacy dominated the northern sections. The area was also a home and hunting ground of the Ais Indians, who lived between the Sabine and Neches rivers. An early settler, William McFarland, noted in his diary in 1844 that the Ais Indians were an older group incorporated in the Caddo confederacy. Another tribe, the Biloxi Indians, established three villages east of the Neches River in Jasper County before 1846. They were never large in number and were considered peaceful.