Cass County Texas map
33.08° N · 94.36° W · County seat: Linden · 960 sq mi
Cass County is one of only three counties in Texas that touch two other states — Arkansas at its northeast corner and Louisiana on the southeast — and the Texas-Arkansas-Louisiana tripoint falls on its boundary. It changed its own name once as well: from 1861 to 1871 it was Davis County, until the legislature put Lewis Cass back. Wright Patman Lake floods its northern edge, and the rest is pine timber cut on rotation.
Linden sits at the centre where SH-8, SH-11 and SH-155 meet. Atlanta and Queen City are on US-59 to the east; Wright Patman Lake and the Sulphur River are along the top of the map.
Where Cass County is
The county was organised in 1846 out of Bowie County and named for Lewis Cass, the Michigan senator who had pushed for the annexation of Texas. In 1861 secessionist sentiment renamed it Davis County after Jefferson Davis; the old name was restored in 1871. Its neighbours run clockwise from Bowie County on the north to Miller County, Arkansas on the northeast, Caddo Parish, Louisiana on the southeast, Marion County south and Morris County west.
Atlanta is about 31 miles southwest of Texarkana on US-59 and 46 miles northeast of Longview. Linden, the seat, is a smaller place 12 miles west of Atlanta on SH-8 — an arrangement that has held since the county was laid out with the courthouse at its geographic centre rather than on the railroad.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | Population in county (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Atlanta | City | 5,432 |
| Linden (county seat) | City | 1,823 |
| Hughes Springs (part) | City | 1,585 |
| Queen City | City | 1,402 |
| Avinger | Town | 378 |
| Bloomburg | Town | 321 |
| Douglassville | Town | 211 |
| Marietta | Town | 114 |
| Domino | Town | 71 |
Hughes Springs straddles the line with Morris County. Domino, at the north end near the Sulphur River, is a small incorporated town beside a paper mill; Avinger, in the southwest, sits near an arm of Lake O' the Pines. Queen City and Bloomburg are strung along US-59 north of Atlanta.
Roads
- US-59 – the main route, entering from Texarkana in the north and running through Bloomburg, Queen City and Atlanta before crossing into Marion County toward Jefferson. It is being rebuilt through here as I-369.
- SH-8 – the east–west road through the middle, from Linden east through Atlanta to the Louisiana line, and west from Linden toward Hughes Springs and Daingerfield.
- SH-11 – southwest from Linden through Avinger toward Pittsburg and Winnsboro.
- SH-77 – north from Atlanta toward Douglassville and the Sulphur River.
- SH-155 – south from Linden toward Ore City and Gilmer.
Wright Patman Lake and the Sulphur River
The Sulphur River forms the county's northern boundary, and its impoundment behind Wright Patman Dam in Bowie County backs water westward along that line. The reservoir, built by the Corps of Engineers for flood control on the Red River system and originally called Lake Texarkana, is shared between Bowie and Cass counties. Atlanta State Park is the Cass County side of it, on a wooded point off FM 96 and FM 1154 about ten miles north of Atlanta, with campsites, boat ramps and short trails through pine and hardwood.
South of the lake the drainage reverses: creeks in the lower half of the county run toward Big Cypress Bayou and Lake O' the Pines, whose eastern arm reaches into the county near Avinger.
Timber, iron and Linden music
Pine plantation and the mills that consume it are the county's largest industry; the paper mill at Domino has run since the middle of the twentieth century and Atlanta grew as its service town. Before timber it was iron: the northeast Texas iron ore belt runs through Cass and Marion counties, and nineteenth-century furnaces worked local ore near Hughes Springs and Linden.
The Cass County courthouse at Linden, built in 1861, is generally described as the oldest Texas courthouse still in continuous use for county business. Linden also produced two very different musicians: the blues guitarist T-Bone Walker, born there in 1910, and Don Henley of the Eagles, who grew up in the town and went to school at nearby Linden-Kildare.