TERRY, TEXAS: GHOST TOWN OF ORANGE COUNTY
By W. T. Block
In 1972, while officer-in-charge at the Orange post office, I found 4 unused metal postmarking stamps, one of them being the discontinued post office of Terry, Texas. Terry was in central Orange County, 11 miles east of Beaumont and 13 miles west of Orange, where the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks intersected Highway 1134.
Long before Terry was a surveyed townsite, it was the location in 1829 of the log cabin of George Alexander Pattillo, one of the giant figures of frontier Texas. He received a Mexican land grant, and in 1835 he was postmaster at Pattillo's Station, a stop on the 107-mile mail route No. 6 between Liberty and Calcasieu River.
He was also representative in the 6th Congress and senator in the 7th, 8th, and 9th Congresses of the Republic of Texas. He was also the first chief justice of Orange County in 1852. In 1855 he sold most of his headright league and moved to Bunn's Bluff on Neches River, where he died in 1871.
Terry was built on a section of land awarded to Texas and New Orleans Railroad in 1860. The first railroad built from Beaumont to Orange in that year was abandoned in Feb., 1863, and it was not rebuilt until 1876. Terry was platted by the railroad in 1876 and probably named for J. L. Terry, who was a railroad official. A post office was established there in 1877, and a revised plat of the town was filed in 1887.
With probably an abundance of nearby prairie land, Terry was devoted to agriculture during most of the town's life. Evidently a number of French Acadians settled there first around 1860, because in Sept. 1877, they completed the second Catholic Church ever built in Southeast Texas, although they did not have a permanent priest until 1880. According to his memoirs, a Methodist circuit rider, Rev. W. H. Crawford, was pastor of Terry's Methodist Church in 1881.
The year 1892 brought the first sizeable rice industry to Orange County, perhaps half of it centered around Terry. Those early rice planters, which included B. H. Norsworthy, George Catron, D. R. Wingate, and J. L. W. Waters, shipped their first 70,000 pounds of rice in boxcars to a New Orleans mill in Nov., 1892. Waters' 500-acre rice firm, located 12 miles west of Orange, utilized a new steam plow, that "...could do the work of 8 yokes of oxen or 16 mules and turning plows..."
By 1898, Terry's rice farms were being irrigated by the Cow Bayou Canal Company and the Des Moines Canal Company. In Feb. 1898, the towboat Nellie, Capt. Lee Rosenbaum, left the Bland rice farm on Cow Bayou, towing the barge Welcome, loaded with 864 barrels of rice, equal to 135,260 pounds.
Perhaps the best known of Terry's new rice farmers was Kichimatsu Kishi, who in 1907 imported a colony of Japanese rice and truck farmers. The farmers prospered there for many years, although their progress was temporarily halted by salt water intrusions from the new Oilla oil field, discovered in 1913, which was adjacent to the Kishi rice fields. However it was the Great Depression of the 1930's that destroyed agriculture in that area and brought about the discontinuance of the Terry post office in 1939.
Also in 1913, during Orange County's lumber boom, C. E. Slade founded Terry Lumber Company, which operated a sawmill there. The lumber company went bankrupt in 1917, and the mill was dismantled and moved away.
Terry was never more than a rural community, with its peak population of 200 persons between 1900-1915. By 1939 its rural population numbered only about 40 persons when its post office was discontinued, and there are still a number of rural residences in that vicinity today. Nevertheless Terry is now a ghost town of Orange County with a unique history, and because of that, it deserves to be remembered.
W.T. Block. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
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