e-ReferenceDesk's College and 50 State Learning Resource Guide

Find Online Colleges

Find Campus Colleges

Texas State...

Texas

Choose a County

Anderson, Andrews, Angelina, Aransas, Archer, Armstrong, Atascosa, Austin, Bailey, Bandera, Bastrop, Baylor, Bee, Bell, Bexar, Blanco, Borden, Bosque, Bowie, Brazoria, Brazos, Brewster, Briscoe, Brooks, Brown, Burleson, Burnet, Caldwell, Calhoun, Callahan, Cameron, Camp, Carson, Cass, Castro, Chambers, Cherokee, Childress, Clay, Cochran, Coke, Coleman, Collin, Collingsworth, Colorado, Comal, Comanche, Concho, Cooke, Coryell, Cottle, Crane, Crockett, Crosby, Culberson, Dallam, Dallas, Dawson, Deaf Smith, Delta, Denton, DeWitt, Dickens, Dimmit, Donley, Duval, Eastland, Ector, Edwards, El Paso, Ellis, Erath, Falls, Fannin, Fayette, Fisher, Floyd, Foard, Fort Bend, Franklin, Freestone, Frio, Gaines, Galveston, Garza, Gillespie, Glasscock, Goliad, Gonzales, Gray, Grayson, Gregg, Grimes, Guadalupe, Hale, Hall, Hamilton, Hansford, Hardeman, Hardin, Harris, Harrison, Hartley, Haskell, Hays, Hemphill, Henderson, Hidalgo, Hill, Hockley, Hood, Hopkins, Houston, Howard, Hudspeth, Hunt, Hutchinson, Irion, Jack, Jackson, Jasper, Jeff Davis, Jefferson, Jim Hogg, Jim Wells, Johnson, Jones, Karnes, Kaufman, Kendall, Kenedy, Kent, Kerr, Kimble, King, Kinney, Kleberg, Knox, La Salle, Lamar, Lamb, Lampasas, Lavaca, Lee, Leon, Liberty, Limestone, Lipscomb, Live Oak, Llano, Loving, Lubbock, Lynn, Madison, Marion, Martin, Mason, Matagorda, Maverick, McCulloch, McLennan, McMullen, Medina, Menard, Midland, Milam, Mills, Mitchell, Montague, Montgomery, Moore, Morris, Motley, Nacogdoches, Navarro, Newton, Nolan, Nueces, Ochiltree, Oldham, Orange, Palo Pinto, Panola, Parker, Parmer, Pecos, Polk, Potter, Presidio, Rains, Randall, Reagan, Real, Red River, Reeves, Refugio, Roberts, Robertson, Rockwall, Runnels, Rusk, Sabine, San Augustine, San Jacinto, San Patricio, San Saba, Schleicher, Scurry, Shackelford, Shelby, Sherman, Smith, Somervell, Starr, Stephens, Sterling, Stonewall, Sutton, Swisher, Tarrant, Taylor, Terrell, Terry, Throckmorton, Titus, Tom Green, Travis, Trinity, Tyler, Upshur, Upton, Uvalde, Val Verde, Van Zandt, Victoria, Walker, Waller, Ward, Washington, Webb, Wharton, Wheeler, Wichita, Wilbarger, Willacy, Williamson, Wilson, Winkler, Wise, Wood, Yoakum, Young, Zapata, Zavala

Texas Counties

Click Image to Enlarge

Texas Counties

Texas is divided into 254 counties, more than any other U.S. state Texas was originally divided into municipalities, a unit of local government under Spanish and Mexican rule. When the Republic of Texas gained its independence in 1836, there were 23 municipalities, which became the original Texas counties. Many of these would later be divided into new counties. The most recent county to be created was Kenedy County in 1921. The most recent county to be organized was Loving County in 1931

Wood County, Texas

Wood County History, Geography, Demographics, Cities and Towns, and Education

County Seat: Quitman
Year Organized: 1850
Square Miles: 650

Court House:

P.O. Box 938
County Courthouse
Quitman, TX 75783-0938

Etymology - Origin of County Name

George Tyler Wood, the second Governor of Texas (coincidentally, the county is located in heavily timbered East Texas)

Demographics:

County QuickFacts: Census Bureau Quick Facts

County History

Wood County is a county located in the U.S. state of Texas. Its county seat is Quitman

Caddo Indians lived in the East Texas timberlands centuries before the first Europeans entered the area. The area of Wood County was first explored in 1788 when Pedro Vial^qv made his way from Natchitoches, Louisiana, to San Antonio. Several Spanish land grants were issued for land in the county, but they are relatively unimportant since the county was not extensively settled until after the Texas Revolution.^qv One of the first white men to settle permanently in Wood County was Martin Varner,^qv who lived southeast of the site of present Hainesville by 1824. Webster, the first real community in the area, was established by 1845. In 1850 Wood County was demarked from Van Zandt County and organized. Quitman was established to serve as the county seat. The county was named for George T. Wood,^qv governor of Texas from 1847 to 1849. In 1870 the new Rains County took a section of western Wood County. Wood County was predominantly settled by people who came from the southern United States. These settlers brought slaves with them and began to reestablish the kind of slaveholding, cotton-plantation society they had known in their former homes. In 1850 Wood County had seventeen slaves. By 1860 it had a white population of 3,963 and 923 slaves (roughly 20 percent of the total population) and produced 1,108 bales of cotton. The coming of secession^qv and the Civil War^qv showed the mixed feelings that many citizens of Wood County had toward both subjects. In 1861 the county voted in favor of secession by a majority of 70 percent, yet the two men elected by the county to serve as its delegates to the Secession Convention,^qv John D. Rains and A. P. Shuford, both voted against the secession ordinance. Emory Rains,^qv state senator from Wood County, was one of the signers of the public address asking the citizens of Texas to vote against secession. After the Civil War began Wood County supported the Confederacy with men and material goods. Defeat brought military government and Reconstruction^qv to the county. Reconstruction was effectively ended in 1873 with the election of men from the Democratic party^qv on both the county and state level.

More at Handbook of Texas Online, s.v. "," http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/WW/hcw15.html (accessed November 9, 2008).

Geography

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 696 square miles (1,802 km²), of which, 650 square miles (1,684 km²) of it is land and 46 square miles (118 km²) of it (6.55%) is water.

Neighboring Counties:

Hopkins County (north)
Franklin County (northeast)
Camp County (northeast)
Upshur County (east)
Smith County (south)
Van Zandt County (southwest)
Rains County (west)

Cities and Towns:

- Alba	town	Incorporated Area
- Hawkins	city	Incorporated Area
- Mineola	city	Incorporated Area
- Oak Grove	town	Incorporated Area
- Quitman (County Seat)	city	Incorporated Area
- Winnsboro	city	Incorporated Area
- Yantis	town	Incorporated Area

County Resources:

Enter County Resources and Information Here

County Resources

The history of our nation was a prolonged struggle to define the relative roles and powers of our governments: federal, state, and local. And the names given the counties, our most locally based jurisdictions, reflects the "characteristic features of this country!"

But age, size and colorful names of our counties isn't the only reason to explore counties' role in American history, or the history of county government itself. In fact, the story of county government reflects the larger meanings of American history.

Today's counties are the most flexible, locally responsive and creative governments in the US. They are the most diverse, varying in size, population, geography, and governmental structure. In their politics and policies, they express a 1990's political slogan "Think globally, act locally."