The History of Huntington, Texas

Long before there was a town, the rich stands of longleaf and shortleaf pine around the site drew the attention of timber men. In the 1880s, Lewis Baird and Alvin Russell tried to establish a townsite near these forests, but their efforts came to nothing — there was no railroad to carry the timber to market, and without it a town could not take hold.

The land waited. It was the railroad, more than any settler, that would finally call a community into being here, and it would do so quickly once the rails were laid through the central part of the county.

In June 1900, E. A. Blount of Nacogdoches and W. J. Townsend, Sr., of Lufkin laid out a townsite where the new rail line crossed the pine country. They considered naming it 'Old Homer' after Angelina County's former county seat, but settled instead on Huntington — for Collis P. Huntington, the chairman of the Southern Pacific Railroad, whose line ran through the new town. Lots were sold at public auction, and a post office opened that same year with R. D. Chapman as the first postmaster.

The railroad arrived in force when the Beaumont-to-Dallas line was built through Huntington in May 1903. With the rails came the means to ship timber and farm goods, and the little town quickly became a trading point for the surrounding country of farms and forest.

Lumbering built Huntington. In 1900, A. F. Smith put up a sawmill two miles east of town, and a few years later Joe Burnaman built a larger mill nearby. The Huntington Baptist Church was organized in 1902, and over the following decades Pentecostal, Church of Christ, and Methodist congregations joined it. A telephone exchange came in 1907 and electric service in 1927.

Huntington incorporated in 1937, with Fowler Burris as its first mayor. As the great virgin forests were cut, the economy leaned on farming and the remaining timber, and the town grew steadily — from about 600 people in 1904 to over a thousand by 1960 and roughly 2,000 by 2000. Today Huntington is a quiet Angelina County town near Lufkin, home of the Red Devils, and known as a gateway to the great Lake Sam Rayburn just to the east.