The History of Newton, Texas

Newton County was created in 1846 when the Texas legislature split off the eastern half of Jasper County. The county was named in honor of John Newton, an American Revolutionary War veteran, and the town that would become its seat took the same name.

The earliest county seats were at Quicksand Creek and then Burkeville, but disputed land titles at Burkeville led a local committee to lay out a fresh town and courthouse at the geographic center of the county in 1853. They called it Newton. A permanent post office opened that same year. Even after a majority of voters favored returning the seat to Burkeville in 1855, officials refused to leave the Newton courthouse, and the legislature reaffirmed Newton's status the following year.

Like much of deep East Texas, Newton grew up around the pine forests that surrounded it. The heavily timbered country fed sawmills, grist mills, and flour mills, and by 1913 the town had around fifteen mercantile establishments and a turpentine plant employing roughly 200 people — a major operation for a town this size.

The completion of the Orange and Northwestern Railway in 1906 linked Newton south to Orange, giving local timber and farm products a route to market. As the first-growth timber thinned, oil discoveries and farming — cotton, cattle, and hogs — helped sustain the local economy. The town incorporated in 1935, and the Newton Herald, established in 1924, chronicled it all.

Newton's centerpiece is its 1902 county courthouse, an unusual three-story Second Empire building with a mansard roof and a clock-and-bell tower — a style already old-fashioned when it was built. Clay for the original brick was mined locally on Caney Creek and fired right on the courthouse square. A real four-faced clock was added in 1929.

On August 4, 2000, a fire blamed on faulty wiring near the bell tower gutted the interior and damaged county records. Rather than tear it down, the county painstakingly restored the landmark, and it reopened in December 2012 after more than $4.4 million in Texas Historical Commission restoration grants. Today Newton remains a small, resilient county-seat town in the deep Piney Woods, known across the state for its powerhouse high-school football program and its proximity to Toledo Bend.