The History of Kirbyville, Texas

Kirbyville was established in 1895, when the Gulf, Beaumont and Kansas City railroad reached the site and R. P. Allen of Galveston laid out the townsite. The line ran between the Neches and Sabine rivers, opening the rich timber country of Jasper County to market, and a town was platted to handle the lumber being cut from the surrounding forests.

The town was first named simply 'Kirby,' chosen by W. C. Averill — then treasurer of the railroad — to honor John Henry Kirby, the rising lumber industrialist whose timber holdings the line was built to serve. When postal officials discovered another Texas town already called Kirby, the name was changed to Kirbyville, and so it has remained. By 1896 the young settlement had four general stores, a hotel, a school of seventy-five pupils, and about 300 residents.

Kirbyville's fortunes rose with the man it was named for. In 1901 John Henry Kirby combined some fourteen sawmills into the Kirby Lumber Company, becoming the largest lumber manufacturer in Texas. At the company's peak, between 1910 and 1920, the firm operated twelve mills and five logging camps and employed around 16,500 people across its operations — and Kirbyville became a classic East Texas company town, its economy and daily life bound up with the mills.

The lumber boom drove rapid growth. By 1914 Kirbyville's population had swelled to roughly 2,900, and after 1904 the Jasper and Eastern Railway made the town its Texas terminus, reinforcing its role as a shipping point. The pine forests of Jasper County fed the saws, and the saws built the town.

As the great virgin pine was cut over, Kirbyville did what resilient East Texas towns do — it diversified. By the 1920s and 1930s the area had branched into cotton marketing, cattle raising, dairying, and pulpwood production, with Satsuma oranges grown locally enough to earn the town a reputation as their 'home.' The population settled back toward 2,000 by 1928 and held in that range for decades, even as the timber giants of the boom years faded.

Kirbyville incorporated in 1926, and in 2026 the town marks its centennial as an incorporated community. Today it remains a quiet Piney Woods town of around 2,000 people, anchored by the Kirbyville CISD Wildcats and its long timber heritage, with the great East Texas lakes and forests within easy reach. The mills that once defined it have largely gone, but the town they built endures.