Lably
Skip to content

East Texas

Geographic and cultural region of the U.S. state of Texas

  • 19 min read
  • 7 chapters

Related on Lably

Through Region, Ecoregion and Latitude

Lab · Class 12Linear ProgrammingLab · Class 6–10Maps & ProjectionsLab · Class 9–10Areas Related To CirclesLab · Class 8–12Ecosystem Dynamics

East Texas is a broadly defined cultural, geographic, and ecological region in the eastern part of the U.S. state of Texas that consists of approximately 38 counties. It is roughly divided into Northeast, Southeast, and Deep East Texas. Most of the region consists of the Piney Woods ecoregion. East Texas can sometimes be defined only as the Piney Woods. At the fringes, towards Central Texas, the forests expand outward toward sparser trees and eventually into open plains.

According to the Handbook of Texas, the East Texas area "may be separated from the rest of Texas roughly by a line extending from the Red River in north-central Lamar County southwestward to east-central Limestone County and then southeastward towards eastern Galveston Bay." Most sources separate the Gulf Coast area into a separate region.

The East Texas region includes Tyler, Kilgore, Longview, Texarkana, Lufkin, Marshall, Palestine, Henderson, Jacksonville, Mount Pleasant, and Nacogdoches as principal cities in addition to, in its expanded definition, Greenville, and the metropolitan statistical areas of Houston and Beaumont.

Geography

Climate is the unifying factor in the region's geography; all of East Texas has the humid subtropical climate typical of the Southeast, occasionally interrupted by intrusions of cold air from the north. East Texas receives more rainfall, 35 to 60 inches (890 to 1,520 mm), than the rest of Texas. In Houston, the average January temperature is 50.4 °F (10.2 °C) and the average July temperature is 82.6 °F (28.1 °C). However, Houston has slightly warmer winters than most of East Texas due to its lower latitude and proximity to the coast.

All of East Texas lies within the Gulf Coastal Plain. It has less uniformity of climate than the rolling hills in the north and flat coastal plains in the south. Local vegetation varies from north to south, with the lower third consisting of the temperate grassland extending from South Texas to South Louisiana and the northern two-thirds of the region dominated by the temperate forest known as the Piney Woods. These extend more than 23,500 square miles (61,000 km2). The Piney Woods are part of a much larger region of pine-hardwood forest that extends into Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. The Piney Woods area thins out as it nears the Gulf of Mexico. West of the Piney Woods are the ranchlands and remnant oak forests of the East Central Texas forests ecoregion.

The Sabine, Trinity, Neches, Angelina and Sulphur rivers are the major rivers in East Texas, but the Brazos and Red rivers also flow through the region. The Brazos cuts through the southwest portion of the region, while the Red River forms its northern border with Oklahoma and a portion of Arkansas. In East Texas and the rest of the South, small rivers and creeks collect into swamps called bayous and merge with the surrounding forest. Bald cypress and Spanish moss are the dominant plants in bayous. The most famous of these bayous are Cypress Bayou and Buffalo Bayou. Cypress Bayou surrounds the Big, Little, and Black Cypress rivers around Jefferson. They flow east into Caddo Lake, and the adjoining wetlands cover the rim and islands of the lake.

Deep East Texas

Deep East Texas is a subregion of East Texas, alongside Northeast and Southeast Texas. According to the Deep East Texas Council of Governments, the region consists of the following twelve counties: Angelina, Houston, Jasper, Nacogdoches, Newton, Polk, Sabine, San Augustine, San Jacinto, Shelby, Trinity, and Tyler.

The "Deep" designation comes from the similarity to East Texas (it is similar in culture and topography, being highly forested), but with a location "deeper" (i.e., farther south and towards the Gulf Coast) than the rest of East Texas.

"Deep" also refers to the cultural and social characteristics of the area. This is considered synonymous to the "Big Thicket", an allusion to the dense growth of underbrush in the Piney Woods. It was the earliest area of Texas to be settled by Anglo-Americans from the United States (and one of the last areas to submit to law enforcement—by the governments of New Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the state of Texas, or the United States). Well into the first quarter of the 20th century, renegade clans controlled local governments, especially in Shelby County.

The area contains two of the oldest towns in Texas; Nacogdoches, the oldest town in Texas, dating from the 18th century, and San Augustine, the oldest "British-American" settlement in Texas, dating from the 1820s. People of English, Scottish, Scots-Irish, and to a lesser extent Welsh ancestry predominate in this region, because of the history of settlement. This is in contrast to West Texas and South Central Texas, where people of Hispanic and German ancestry predominate, respectively. Hispanic settlers are descended from colonists of New Spain, dating from the 16th and 17th centuries. Most of the German immigrant ancestors in Central Texas arrived after the Revolutions of 1848.

The Spanish and later Mexican governments did not want settlers from the United States until after Mexico had gained independence. East Texas had been barely settled by Spanish and Mexican colonists, and the government decided to allow immigration from the US to bolster defenses against raiding by the Apache and Comanche. Neither government was able to exert much control or law enforcement in the area. As a consequence, the "Big Thicket" became a refuge for criminals fleeing the United States and hiding out in a "no man's land" in the pine tree thickets.

The Pine Curtain

The early isolation of the region and its links to the Deep South have resulted in the piney woods being described as a 'curtain' that demarcates a certain cultural enclave or bubble that distinguishes East Texas from the rest of the state. Former residents describe living behind the 'Pine Curtain' as a form of escape. The phrase is often used to describe the area; it appeared in a newspaper column in the Palestine Herald-Press, and in a late 20th-century tourist guide by Mike Dougan.

Sign in to keep reading

6 more chapters are free with a Lably account.

More in Earth science

Climate changeHuman-caused changes to climate on EarthKöppen climate classificationClimate classification systemIndian subcontinentPhysiographical region in South AsiaLimestoneType of sedimentary rockTropical cycloneRapidly rotating storm systemPleistoceneFirst epoch of the Quaternary Period