Titus County Texas map
33.22° N · 94.97° W · County seat: Mount Pleasant · 425 sq mi · Central Time
Titus County is small — 425 square miles, one of the more compact counties in Northeast Texas — and it packs in an interstate, a chain of reservoirs on Big Cypress Creek, open-pit lignite mines and a poultry industry that feeds most of the county's payroll. Mount Pleasant, the seat, holds more than half its 31,247 people.
The pin marks Mount Pleasant. I-30 runs east–west across the middle of the frame; the water to the south is Lake Bob Sandlin and, east of it, the Monticello cooling reservoir.
Where the county is
Only four counties touch it. Red River County is north, Morris County east, Camp County south and Franklin County west. Both Morris and Franklin were cut out of Titus County itself in 1875, which is why the county is now so much smaller than the one created in 1846.
Mount Pleasant sits on I-30 roughly halfway between the Dallas area and Texarkana. By straight line, Paris is 46 miles northwest, Longview 51 miles southeast, Texarkana 56 miles northeast and Tyler 63 miles southwest. McKinney is 97 miles west and Garland 99 miles southwest.
The legislature created Titus County in 1846 out of Bowie County and named it for Andrew Jackson Titus, a planter who represented the district in the state legislature. Titus and neighbouring Camp County together form the Mount Pleasant micropolitan statistical area. The 2024 Census estimate is 31,547, close to flat since 2020.
Incorporated places
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Mount Pleasant | City (seat) | 16,099 |
| Talco | City | 494 |
| Winfield | City | 409 |
| Miller's Cove | Town | 69 |
Talco is in the far northwest of the county near the Sulphur River; Winfield and Miller's Cove are small places on the I-30 corridor west of Mount Pleasant.
Roads
- Interstate 30 – crosses the county east–west through Winfield and Mount Pleasant, the Dallas–Texarkana–Little Rock route. Every long-distance movement through the county uses it.
- US-67 – runs beside I-30 through the county as the older parallel route and the business road through Mount Pleasant.
- US-271 – the north–south route, entering from Paris in the northwest, crossing I-30 at Mount Pleasant and continuing southeast toward Pittsburg, Gilmer and Tyler. It is a four-lane divided highway for much of its length here.
- SH-49 – runs east from Mount Pleasant toward Daingerfield in Morris County.
- SH-11 – crosses the south of the county through the lake country toward Winnsboro in one direction and Pittsburg in the other.
Lignite, power and poultry
Southeast of Mount Pleasant the Monticello Steam Electric Station burned lignite from the 1970s until it closed in January 2018. The lignite came out of surface mines opened alongside the plant, on ground that is now largely reclaimed pasture and young woodland; the reservoir built to cool the units still sits beside the plant site. The plant's closure removed the county's largest single industrial employer and its largest single taxpayer at a stroke.
Lake Bob Sandlin lies in the county's southwest on Big Cypress Creek, shared with Camp and Franklin counties. It is the middle link in a chain — Lake Cypress Springs upstream, Lake O' the Pines downstream — that makes this stretch of Northeast Texas thick with waterfront. Lake Bob Sandlin State Park sits on the lake shore southwest of Mount Pleasant, with camping, a boat ramp and pine-and-hardwood trails. The lakes and the reclaimed mine land, together with a scattering of oil found near Talco in the 1930s, account for most of what the county sells other than food.
Poultry is the constant. Mount Pleasant sits in the broiler belt that runs across Titus, Camp and Franklin counties, and processing plants in and around town employ several thousand people. That work drew a large Latino population from the 1990s onward, and Titus County now has one of the highest Hispanic population shares of any county in Northeast Texas — a demographic profile more like South Texas than like its immediate neighbours.