Sabine County Texas map
31.34° N · 93.85° W · County seat: Hemphill · 577 sq mi · Central Time
Sabine County has water on one side and national forest on the other. Toledo Bend Reservoir floods the whole eastern boundary, where the Sabine River used to run as the Texas–Louisiana line, and the Sabine National Forest covers much of what is left. Of the county's 577 square miles, 85 are water — about 15 percent, one of the highest shares in East Texas.
The pin marks Hemphill. The lobed water body filling the right side of the frame is Toledo Bend; the far shore is Louisiana.
Where Sabine County sits
The county occupies a corner of the Texas border with Louisiana. Sabine Parish, Louisiana, lies across the reservoir to the northeast. Inside Texas, Shelby County is northwest, San Augustine County is west, Jasper County is southwest and Newton County is south. That is the whole list: five neighbours, and one of them is in another state.
Nothing large is close. Nacogdoches is 51 miles northwest in a straight line and Lufkin 52 miles west; Beaumont is 89 miles southwest and Tyler 110 miles northwest. There is no interstate within a hundred miles, and the nearest four-lane divided highway of any length is US-59 west of the county.
Sabine is one of the original 23 counties of the Republic of Texas, organised in December 1837 and named for the river that defined its eastern edge before the dam. The Spanish sabina means cypress, the tree that grew along the river bottom. The 2024 Census estimate puts the population at 10,058, a small rise on the 9,894 counted in 2020.
Towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Hemphill | City (seat) | 1,030 |
| Pineland | City | 892 |
Two incorporated places between them hold under a fifth of the county's people. The rest live in unincorporated communities and along the lake roads.
Roads
- US-96 – the main north–south route, entering from Shelby County above Pineland and running south through Pineland and Brookeland toward Jasper and, eventually, Beaumont.
- SH-21 – comes in from San Augustine on the El Camino Real alignment, passes through Hemphill and ends at the Toledo Bend crossing into Louisiana at Pendleton Bridge.
- SH-87 – runs south from Hemphill along the reservoir's western side toward Milam and the Newton County line.
- SH-103 – enters from the west and joins the Hemphill road network, linking the county to San Augustine and Lufkin.
- SH-184 – a short connector in the north of the county between US-96 and the Shelby County line.
SH-21 at Pendleton Bridge is the only highway crossing of Toledo Bend from this county. The next crossing north is at Logansport, Louisiana, and the next south is the dam road.
Toledo Bend and the national forest
Toledo Bend Reservoir is the largest reservoir in Texas by surface area, at roughly 185,000 acres, and it is not entirely a Texas lake: the state line runs down the middle of it, and the Sabine River Authority of Texas and its Louisiana counterpart operate it jointly. The dam sits at the county's southeastern end and was completed in 1969. Water covers the old river channel and the bottomland along it, which is why Sabine County's water figure is so large and why the shoreline is so ragged on the map — every creek arm became a cove.
The Sabine National Forest covers a wide band of the county between US-96 and the reservoir. Its ranger district office is at Hemphill. The forest and the lake together make recreation the county's most visible business: bass fishing, boat ramps and lakeside camps, with Ragtown, Indian Mound and Willow Oak among the Forest Service recreation areas on the Texas shore.
On 1 February 2003 the Space Shuttle Columbia broke up over East Texas, and Sabine County became the centre of the recovery. The largest concentration of debris fell in and around the county, the crew were found here, and a memorial in Hemphill records it. Search crews worked the forest and the lake margin for weeks.