Tennessee Colony: Cotton to Concrete

Tennessee Colony, in northwestern Anderson County, was settled in eighteen forty-seven by a large group of families from Tennessee and Alabama who gave their new home the name of the state they left behind. The moist East Texas climate suited cotton, and plantation agriculture took hold quickly. The Jackson Plantation became one of the largest cotton operations in the region.

By eighteen fifty-one the community had a log school, and a post office followed a year later. For most of the next century Tennessee Colony was a small farming crossroads. Then, in nineteen sixty-five, the Texas Department of Corrections purchased twenty-one thousand acres southwest of town and began building the Coffield Unit, a medium-security prison designed to hold two thousand inmates.

A second facility, the Beto Unit, was completed in nineteen eighty-four. The economy of this tiny East Texas settlement is now defined by the two state prisons at its edge.