Red River County Texas map
33.62° N · 95.05° W · County seat: Clarksville · 1,057 sq mi
Red River County is one of the original 23 counties of the Republic of Texas, and it is bounded by two rivers: the Red along the Oklahoma line to the north and the Sulphur through the timbered bottoms to the south. Lamar, Bowie and Titus counties were all cut out of its original territory, which is why a county with 11,587 residents still covers 1,057 square miles.
Centered near Clarksville. The northern boundary is the Red River; the wooded southern boundary follows the Sulphur.
Where Red River County is
It occupies the far northeast corner of Texas, one county short of Arkansas. McCurtain County, Oklahoma lies north across the river and Choctaw County, Oklahoma northwest. On the Texas side, Lamar County is west, Bowie County east, Morris County southeast and Titus, Franklin and Delta counties south and southwest — eight neighbours in all, two of them in another state.
Paris is about 29 miles west on US-82 and Texarkana 59 miles east on the same road; Longview is 79 miles southeast and Tyler 89 miles southwest. The county is in the 1st congressional district.
The county was organized in the 1830s out of the Red River settlements, took its name from the river, and then spent the next fifty years being subdivided: Lamar County was cut off its western side in 1840, and Bowie, Titus, Delta and others followed. The population peaked generations ago and has fallen steadily since; 11,587 people were counted in 2020, thinly spread across 1,044 square miles of land.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population in county |
|---|---|---|
| Clarksville (county seat) | City | 2,853 |
| Bogata | City | 1,076 |
| Detroit | Town | 705 |
| Avery | Town | 422 |
| Annona | Town | 185 |
| Deport (part) | City | 28 |
Deport is almost entirely in Lamar County; only 28 of its residents were counted on the Red River County side.
Roads
- US-82 – the county's main street, running west to east through Detroit, Clarksville, Annona and Avery, connecting Paris to Texarkana.
- US-271 – enters from Paris in the southwest, passes through Bogata, and runs south toward Talco and Mount Pleasant.
- SH-37 – the north–south road through Clarksville, up toward the river and south to Mount Vernon and I-30.
There is no interstate. I-30 runs roughly 30 miles south of Clarksville through Mount Pleasant and Mount Vernon.
The two rivers
The Red River is not a shared boundary in the usual sense. Under the settlement of the Texas–Oklahoma dispute the state line follows the south bank rather than the channel, so the water itself belongs to Oklahoma and the Texas edge shifts when the river does. Its floodplain here is wide, farmed where it is high enough and left in cottonwood and willow where it is not.
The southern boundary is the Sulphur River, and the Sulphur bottoms are a different country again: a broad belt of hardwood swamp and slough, oak and gum and cypress, that has never been much good for anything except timber and hunting. It is one of the largest surviving bottomland hardwood systems in Texas, and it is the reason the southern third of the county has almost no roads and no towns. Between the two rivers the land is red-earth farm and pasture, and the county has only about 13 square miles of standing water — no major reservoir at all, which is unusual for a county this size in East Texas.
Clarksville
Clarksville was laid out in the 1830s, before Texas independence, and was the first stop for many settlers coming overland from Arkansas — the trails from the northeast funnelled through here. The town square still has its courthouse and a ring of nineteenth-century brick fronts, and it functioned for decades as the trade centre for a cotton county. Down the road at Detroit, John Nance Garner was born in 1868; he went on to serve as Speaker of the U.S. House and then as vice president under Franklin Roosevelt from 1933 to 1941.