East Texas History
A project by Sam Houston State UniversityEast Texas History is a free mobile app and web platform that places the past at your fingertips. Designed by the History Department at Sam Houston State University, the project seeks to highlight the distinctive people, places, and events that have shaped East Texas. Viewers may learn about the region through our interactive, map-based interface that includes historical stories, photographs, and oral interviews. Follow our progress on Twitter or connect with us on Facebook to learn more about the project or to become a participating author.
Read more About UsFeatured Stories
Huntsville Prison Recordings
Folklorist John Avery Lomax toured prisons in the South to record the voices and music of those who were incarcerated there, particularly African American inmates or as his records indicate, "Negro convicts." Lomax and his son Alan, a…
Andrew Female College
Huntsville’s Andrew Female College was founded in 1852 and chartered by the Texas Conference of Methodist Churches on February 7, 1853. Its creation mirrored that of Austin College, a men’s institution in Huntsville that had admitted its first class…
Wood County Electric Cooperative
Just a minute’s drive from the 1925 county courthouse in Quitman, Texas, one may find the thoroughly modern, electric blue headquarters of the Wood County Electric Cooperative, Inc. (WCEC). Like many contemporary buildings, the WCEC headquarters was…
Featured Tours
The Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1867
12 Locations ~ Curated by Zachary Doleshal, Ph.D., SHSU Public History Students of 2017Random Stories
State Penitentiary C.S.A. and Texas Civil War Manufacturing
Inmates, slaves, and free men worked in the penitentiary textile factory, which was the main source of cloth goods for the Confederate Southwest. Here, cotton and wool were turned into millions of yards of cloth and yarn. Workers, both paid and…
Captain Joe Byrd Prison Cemetery
Located on twenty-two acres behind Sam Houston State University, Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery serves as the final resting place for inmates who die in prison without funeral or family arrangements.
The cemetery probably began in the 1850s, when the…
Historic American Buildings Survey of Blount House
A month after the federal government authorized the Historic American Buildings Survey to document the country's historic structures, two teams of architects from Dallas headed to San Augustine to begin their mission in East Texas. Over four…
Henderson King Yoakum
Best known as the author of the first "History of Texas," Henderson Yoakum was an accomplished soldier, attorney, and politician. Born in 1810 in Claiborne County, Tennessee, Yoakum graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He…
Yellow Fever in Anderson, Texas
Anderson, located ten miles northeast of Navasota, is the county seat of Grimes County and was once the fourth most populous town in Texas. Taking advantage of the stage lines which ran through his property, English immigrant Henry Fanthorp ran an…
Buffalo Stadium and Segregated Baseball
Professional baseball began as a collection of company teams in the newly industrialized northeast of the 19th century, and through most of the 20th century the pride of industrial cities often stemmed from the exploits of the local team. Houston,…