The History of East Mountain, Texas

East Mountain was established in the 1870s near a small rise that gave the community its name. A local school was operating by the mid-1870s, and a Primitive Baptist church was organized around the same time, anchoring the early settlement in the Piney Woods country southeast of Gilmer.

The early economy ran on cotton and timber. Sam Salter settled in the area in the late 1870s and built a horse-powered cotton gin, and a short time later Thomas Wells added a steam cotton gin and sawmill. Those gins and the sawmill made East Mountain a small but working farm-and-timber community in its earliest decades.

The community got its first post office in 1902, but under a different name: Savannah, with H. B. Jones as postmaster. The Savannah post office was short-lived, closing in 1905, and a short time later the town's name was changed to East Mountain — restoring the name of the rise the community had grown up around.

Through these years East Mountain remained a modest rural settlement, serving the farmers and ranchers of southeastern Upshur County. The big change was still to come, and it would come from beneath the ground.

When oil was discovered in the area in the 1930s, East Mountain shared in the great East Texas oil boom. A number of local families quickly became wealthy, and at the height of the boom the school and all of the town's churches had producing wells on their land. By the mid-1930s the community had a three-teacher school, three churches, a store, and a number of houses.

After the boom, East Mountain settled into a quieter role. By the 1980s it served as a commercial center for area farmers and ranchers and, increasingly, as a bedroom community for nearby Longview — a pattern that defines it today. Now an incorporated town of around 900 people, East Mountain is a quiet, wooded place where many residents commute to Longview, Gladewater, or Gilmer for work.