The History of Liberty City, Texas

The Liberty City area was settled before the Civil War, growing up not as a single town but as a cluster of rural neighborhoods in the rolling country of west-central Gregg County. Over the years, different sections of the extended community went by different names — Mount Mariah and McCary's Chapel, each named for a local church, and Goforth, after a resident family.

This was farming and timber country, dotted with churches, family homesteads, and a local school. Like much of East Texas before the railroads and the oil derricks, the community was a quiet, close-knit rural place, identified more by its churches and families than by any formal town center.

From 1902 to 1903 a community post office operated out of the home of B. F. Chapman, and the name it carried is one of the most colorful in the county. Chapman had wanted to call the office Sabine, after the local school, but that name was already taken by another Texas post office. He settled instead on 'Hog Eye' — a name that, by local tradition, came either from a notorious local hog thief or from a popular fiddler's tune of the day.

The Sabine name endured anyway, attaching itself to the school and, eventually, the school district that serves the town to this day. By 1940 the community had a school, a community center, an extension library, a church, and a store — the makings of a real town gathering at the crossroads.

Everything changed with the discovery of the East Texas Oil Field — one of the largest oil fields in the world — which set off a frenzied boom across Gregg, Rusk, and the surrounding counties in the early 1930s. Derricks went up across the countryside, workers poured in, and sleepy crossroads communities swelled almost overnight. It was during this oil boom of the early 1930s that the community took the name Liberty City.

The boom gave the town its identity and a lasting economic foothold. After World War II, the population grew steadily — about 1,390 by the late 1970s, over 1,600 by 1990, and roughly 1,935 by 2000, climbing past 2,700 in recent counts. Today Liberty City is an unincorporated census-designated place, a bedroom community between Gladewater, Kilgore, and Longview, still rooted in the oil country that built it.