Evadale

The boat ramp at Evadale provides easy access to the Neches with a single concrete ramp by U.S. HIghway 96. This ramp provides you with access to a large number of sloughs and irrecularities in the river to the south. Much of the river traffic is local, but will consist of of fast-moving motor boats.

The town of Evadale is close. It was the original settlement of Richardson's Bluff. This was the home site of Benjamin Richardson in the early 1800's, an 1830 De Zavala Colony settler. Richardson operated a popular ferry with his sons. It later was renamed Ford's Bluff for a family with a mill site there in 1852. In 1894 Mannie Cox opened a local shingle mill that was sold to Kirby Lumber Company in 1902. When Kirby built it's sawmill here in 1904, the site was renamed Evadale in honor of Miss Eva Dale, a teacher at the Southeast Texas Male and Female College in Jasper.

As you travel south from the boat ramp, you will see the remants of a historic elevated road (pictured below). The construction of this road is very interesting. Heavy timbers remain and you can see the hard-surface construction over the nailed boards across the road.

Some more history...

In 1904, when the post office was established after Kirby's mill was build. By 1914 the Evadale plant, known as Mill U, included kilns, a circular sawmill, and a planing mill with a daily capacity of up to 70,000 board feet. Evadale had a population of 300 by 1920. The Kirby mill closed during the Great Depression,qv and by the late 1940s the town's population had fallen to 100. Economic revitalization began in 1948, when the Champion Paper and Fiber Company acquired riverfront acreage for a pulp mill. By the 1970s the giant Temple-Eastex pulpwood and paper mill dominated the local economy. With the new activity, the population in Evadale reached 700 by the early 1960s. In 1984 the town had twenty-two businesses and an estimated 715 residents. In 1990 its population was 1,422.