Livingston: A Tennessee Town Reborn in Texas

Moses Choate arrived in this corner of East Texas in eighteen thirty-five and surveyed a town he first called Springfield. When Polk County was carved out of northern Liberty County by the first Texas state legislature in eighteen forty-six, Choate offered more than one hundred acres for a county seat, with one condition: that the new town carry the name of his Tennessee hometown. The post office opened in eighteen forty-seven as Livingston.

Growth stayed modest for decades, the community serving a cotton-and-corn agricultural region with a population of about one hundred thirty-five as late as eighteen eighty. Then the Houston East and West Texas Railway arrived, and sawmills multiplied across Polk County. The longleaf pine forests of deep East Texas became an economic engine, and Livingston became the shipping hub for all of it.