Beauxart Gardens

Six miles southeast of Beaumont, the community of Beauxart Gardens began as one of five federal subsistence homestead colonies built in Texas during the New Deal. In nineteen thirty-four, the federal government purchased two hundred five acres of Jefferson County rice land under the National Industrial Recovery Act and divided it into fifty small homesteads. Each family received a modest frame house, a combination barn and garage, a chicken coop, and between two and a half and four and a half acres for gardening and livestock.

The idea was to let workers employed part-time at the region's refineries supplement their incomes through small-scale farming. The federal government transferred ownership to the Beauxart Homestead Association in nineteen thirty-six and continued providing agricultural instruction through the end of the Depression. The State of Texas erected a historical marker in two thousand nine.

Today the community is a quiet census-designated place in suburban Jefferson County, its New Deal origins legible mainly in its unusually regular lot patterns.