Orange, Texas: The Gateway at the Sabine

Orange sits where the Sabine River meets the Gulf coastal plain, the last Texas city before Louisiana. It was settled in the eighteen thirties under Mexican land grants, named Madison in eighteen forty, then renamed Orange in eighteen fifty-eight, possibly for orange trees planted by early settlers or for the Orange County district it would anchor.

Orange's industrial moment came in World War Two, when Consolidated Steel's shipyard here launched more than two hundred vessels for the Navy, transforming a lumber and shrimping town into a wartime production center almost overnight. At its peak the shipyard employed thirty thousand workers. After the war, petrochemical plants took up some of the slack, but Orange never quite regained that scale. The city today is best known in preservation circles for the Stark family's extraordinary collection of museums and historic buildings, which makes this small border city one of the most culturally surprising stops on the entire I-Ten corridor.