Timpson: Named for a Railroad Man

Timpson owes its existence entirely to a railroad survey decision made in New York. In eighteen eighty-four, outside capital, mostly from New York, funded a line from Shreveport to Houston, and engineers laid the route along the northern edge of Shelby County, where three new towns popped into existence almost overnight: Timpson, Tenaha, and Joaquin. Timpson was named for P.

B. Timpson, an engineer on the project. The first passenger train arrived on August first, eighteen eighty-five.

Within five years the town claimed about twelve hundred people, though the census counted fewer, supported by two sawmills, a canning factory, a weekly newspaper, and enough commerce to make Timpson the most important shipping center in the county. Lignite mining later added another layer to the economy. The town remains the kind of small East Texas community that would simply not exist without a single infrastructure decision made nearly a hundred and forty years ago.