Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Browndell, TX

Browndell is a small city in extreme northeastern Jasper County, at the junction of Farm Road 1007 and U.S. Highway 96, about eighty-five miles north of Beaumont in the East Texas Piney Woods.

Browndell grew up around a sawmill built by the Kirby Lumber Corporation after the Gulf, Beaumont and Great Northern Railway opened the surrounding pine forests to large-scale lumbering in the early 1900s.

The mill town was named Browndell in honor of Dell Brown, the wife of one of lumber baron John Henry Kirby's financial backers.

The Browndell post office opened in 1903, during the sawmill boom, but was discontinued in 1928.

A disastrous fire destroyed the Kirby mill in 1925 and threatened the town's existence — Browndell's population, once estimated at about 900, fell to below 200 by the mid-1940s.

Browndell residents voted to incorporate in 1968, decades after the sawmill era ended.

Browndell had a population of 160 at the 2020 census, down from 197 at the 2010 census.

The 2020 census counted just 62 households and 41 families within Browndell's city limits.

Today Browndell covers about 2.4 square miles and is classified as entirely rural — a quiet remnant of the East Texas lumber boom.