Farrsville

FARRSVILLE, TEXAS . Farrsville is on State Highway 63 fifty miles north of Beaumont in northwestern Newton County. Settlers arrived in the area in the 1840s or early 1850s and named their community for Alfred E. Farr, a wealthy farmer and Methodist minister. Census returns show that Farr, who was born in Mississippi, had amassed a total estate of just under $50,000 in Newton County by 1860. The community, originally called Farr's Mill, had a sawmill, water mill, gristmill, and cotton gin. It was on the military road used by Confederate troops during the Civil War and was also on a stage route running from Alexandria, Louisiana, to Beaumont, Texas. A post office opened in Farrsville in 1875. By 1884 the community had a population of 150. The sawmill closed in 1918, when the huge mills at Wiergate began to operate. The gristmill closed seventeen years later. Farrsville maintained a population of seventy-five through most of the first half of the twentieth century and had a post office as late as 1948. In the mid-1960s the population rose to 150, a level it maintained through 2000.