The History of Livingston, Texas

The town was originally settled in 1835 as Springfield. When Polk County was organized, local landowner Moses L. Choate offered to donate one hundred acres if the settlement were chosen as the county seat — and by an election in June 1846, it was selected and renamed Livingston, after Choate's former home in Livingston, Tennessee.

As the county seat, Livingston became the governmental and commercial center of Polk County, a role it has held ever since. The Polk County Courthouse has long anchored its historic downtown, the focal point of civic life in this part of deep East Texas.

Like much of East Texas, Livingston's early economy rose and fell with the Piney Woods timber industry. As the sawmills boomed, so did the town — but as the local timber gave out and the mills began moving away, the population slid to just 928 by 1925.

New life came from underground. The discovery of oil at the Livingston field, about ten miles south, in 1932 sparked fresh growth and helped carry the town through the lean years. Timber and oil together shaped Livingston's first century, leaving it a sturdy county-seat town ready for the changes the modern era would bring.

The biggest modern change was water. The damming of the Trinity River created Lake Livingston, an 82,600-acre reservoir that turned the area into a major recreation and retirement destination and reoriented the local economy around lake tourism. Today Livingston is the largest city in Polk County, with a population of 5,640 at the 2020 census.

Livingston's history is also intertwined with the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas, whose reservation lies in the Big Thicket just east of town. The tribe has called this region home far longer than the town has existed, and today its Naskila Casino is one of the area's biggest attractions — a modern chapter in a very old story.