Henderson County Texas map
32.21° N · 95.85° W · County seat: Athens · 949 sq mi
Cedar Creek Reservoir dominates Henderson County. The lake was filled in 1965 to supply Fort Worth with drinking water, and within twenty years a ring of new towns — Gun Barrel City, Tool, Seven Points, Payne Springs, Log Cabin, Star Harbor — had incorporated around its shoreline, most of them founded by weekenders from Dallas. Athens, the county seat, sits inland from all of it and runs the state's freshwater fish hatchery and aquarium.
Cedar Creek Reservoir runs north–south down the western third of the county. Athens is at the crossing of US-175 and SH-31 in the centre; Lake Palestine touches the southeastern corner near Chandler.
The city of Henderson is not in Henderson County — it is the seat of Rusk County, about 60 miles east. Both are named for James Pinckney Henderson.
Where Henderson County is
The county sits southeast of the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex at the western edge of East Texas. Dallas is 67 miles northwest and Tyler 34 miles east in a straight line; Mesquite, the nearest big suburb, is 58 miles northwest. Athens forms its own micropolitan statistical area, which the Census Bureau folds into the Dallas–Fort Worth combined statistical area — commuting up US-175 is common enough to justify it.
Eight counties touch Henderson: Kaufman and Van Zandt to the north, Smith east, Cherokee southeast, Anderson south, Freestone southwest, Navarro west and Ellis northwest.
Henderson County was organised in 1846 from parts of Houston and Nacogdoches counties and named for James Pinckney Henderson, attorney general and secretary of state of the Republic and then the first governor of the state. Its first town was Buffalo, laid out in 1847; Athens took the courthouse soon after and Buffalo disappeared.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Athens | City (county seat) | 12,863 |
| Gun Barrel City | City | 6,182 |
| Chandler | City | 3,262 |
| Malakoff | City | 2,186 |
| Tool | City | 2,171 |
| Seven Points (part) | City | 1,325 |
| Mabank (part) | Town | 1,258 |
| Brownsboro | City | 1,212 |
| Eustace | City | 1,133 |
| Trinidad | City | 857 |
| Berryville | Town | 827 |
| Payne Springs | Town | 759 |
| Log Cabin | City | 678 |
| Murchison | City | 509 |
Fourteen incorporated places, which is a lot for a county this size, and most of the small ones exist because of the lake. Mabank lies mostly in Kaufman County and Seven Points has a corner there too, so both figures above count only the Henderson County part. Star Harbor, Caney City, Coffee City, Enchanted Oaks, Poynor, Moore Station and Trinidad round out the list of very small municipalities. Athens is still the only town with a courthouse square, a hospital and a college — Trinity Valley Community College has its main campus there.
Roads
- US-175 – the four-lane divided highway from Dallas, entering the northwest past Eustace and running through Athens before continuing southeast toward Jacksonville.
- SH-31 – the east–west route through Athens, east to Tyler, west to Corsicana and I-45.
- SH-19 – north from Athens to Canton and I-20, south toward Palestine.
- SH-334 – crosses Cedar Creek Reservoir on a causeway between Gun Barrel City and Seven Points, the lake's main east–west link.
- SH-274 – serves the lake communities on the western side toward Kemp.
- SH-198 – runs down the eastern shore of Cedar Creek from Mabank through Payne Springs.
- SH-155 – the southeastern route through Frankston toward Tyler.
Cedar Creek Reservoir
Cedar Creek Reservoir was impounded in 1965 by the Tarrant Regional Water District on Cedar Creek, a tributary of the Trinity, and its water is pumped west by pipeline to Fort Worth — a hundred miles away and in a different river basin. Seventy-five of the county's 949 square miles are water, and this lake accounts for the bulk of it.
The shoreline filled with cabins and then with permanent houses, and by the 1970s and 1980s the settlements had incorporated to control their own zoning and utilities. Gun Barrel City, the largest of them, kept a much older local name for the crossroads it grew from. Tool, Payne Springs, Log Cabin, Star Harbor, Enchanted Oaks and Caney City all date from the same lake boom. The result is a county with two economies: farming, cattle and clay pits inland, and a retirement and weekend-house economy along thirty miles of shore.
The southeastern corner of the county touches Lake Palestine on the Neches, which is why Chandler and Berryville have their own marina traffic. Malakoff and Trinidad in the west sit on old lignite ground; the Malakoff Man carvings, three sandstone heads dug from a gravel pit near there in the 1920s and 1930s, are among the odder objects in Texas archaeology.
The Texas Freshwater Fisheries Center
Texas Parks and Wildlife opened the Texas Freshwater Fisheries Center on the edge of Athens in 1996. It is a working production hatchery — most of the Florida-strain largemouth bass stocked in Texas lakes are raised here — combined with a public visitor centre of aquariums, a casting pond and a wetland trail.
It also runs the ShareLunker programme, which takes donated largemouth bass of thirteen pounds and up from anglers across the state, spawns them and returns the offspring to public water. Lake Fork in Wood County supplies most of the entries; the fish themselves come to Athens, which is why the state's bass-fishing records are kept in a county seat rather than at a lake.