The History of Timpson, Texas

Timpson was founded in 1885 when the Houston, East and West Texas Railway was built through the area. The town was named for P. B. Timpson, an engineer on the railroad, and a post office was established that same year with James H. Blankenship as the first postmaster.

Like many railroad towns, Timpson was laid out along the tracks rather than the compass — which is why its streets run at roughly a 43-degree angle 'off' from true north, an unusual grid that still marks the town today. The railroad quickly made Timpson the most important shipping center in the county, the hinge on which the surrounding farm-and-timber country turned.

Timpson grew fast. By 1890 it had a population of about 1,200, with two sawmills, a weekly newspaper, and a canning factory; the town was incorporated by 1892. Several short-line railroads were chartered in connection with Timpson, including the Marshall, Timpson and Sabine Pass Railway, which completed twenty miles of track toward Carthage in 1898.

By the 1920s Timpson had become a shipping point for lignite mined in the area, and the town apparently experienced a boom — its population swelling to an estimated 2,500 by 1927. For a few years it was a bustling Shelby County shipping and trade center, riding the timber and lignite economy of the Piney Woods.

The boom did not last. In the 1930s the lignite trade fell off, and Timpson began a long, steady decline in population, settling into life as a quiet East Texas town of around a thousand people. But the town's name found unexpected fame: the alliterative railroad call of four Shelby County stops — 'Tenaha, Timpson, Bobo, and Blair' — became a good-luck chant for crapshooters, who pronounced Tenaha as 'Tennyhaw' and called the string out for a lucky roll of ten. Cowboy singer and actor Tex Ritter recorded it as a song, carrying Timpson's name far beyond Shelby County.

Today Timpson is a small, friendly town on US-59 (the future I-69) and US-84, home of the Timpson Bears, its annual Frontier Days festival, and a heritage rooted firmly in the rails that built it.