Sulphur Springs: The Dairy Capital of Texas

Sulphur Springs was founded in the late eighteen forties near natural springs , the name is self-explanatory , and by eighteen seventy-one had become the county seat of Hopkins County. The town grew steadily as a cotton and timber market through the nineteenth century.

The economic identity that made it famous came in nineteen thirty-seven, when Carnation Milk Company opened a processing plant here. That single facility triggered a dairy farming boom across the county. Within a decade roughly two hundred class-A dairies had been established in Hopkins County. By the nineteen fifties the county was recognized as the Dairy Capital of Texas, a title it held for decades, until dairy farming declined in the late nineteen nineties. The Hopkins County Dairy Festival, still held annually each June, commemorates an industry that reshaped the entire landscape and economy of northeast Texas for two generations.