24/7 Trauma & Biohazard Cleanup Near West Powderly Powderly, TX

Powderly is an unincorporated census-designated place in north-central Lamar County, on U.S. Highway 271 about ten miles north of Paris and five miles south of the Red River and the Oklahoma border.

Powderly was settled around the time of the Civil War and was originally known as Lenoir.

When the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway was built through the area in the 1880s, the community was renamed in honor of Terence V. Powderly, the national labor leader who later served as commissioner of immigration in the McKinley administration.

A post office was established in 1888, and by 1890 Powderly had a general store, two cotton gins, a gristmill, a sawmill, a blacksmith, and about thirty residents.

The community declined in the 1920s to just 63 reported residents in the early 1930s, then slowly grew back to an estimated 185 people by 1990.

Powderly first appeared as a census-designated place in the 2010 census, when a much larger boundary took in land east of the old townsite and the count jumped to 1,178 people; it rose again to 1,261 in 2020.

The Powderly CDP covers about 7.5 square miles, and the low ridge at its center drains west toward Pat Mayse Lake and east to Pine Creek, a tributary of the Red River.

Pat Mayse Lake, a 6,000-acre U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reservoir about four miles northwest of Powderly, offers fishing, camping, swimming beaches, and public hunting land, while the Camp Maxey Texas National Guard training site - a World War II infantry camp activated in 1942 - lies along Powderly's southwest side.

On November 4, 2022, a violent EF4 tornado with winds estimated at 170 miles per hour tore through the Powderly area, and roughly 50 homes were damaged or destroyed across Lamar County.

The Powderly Volunteer Fire Department has served the community since 1964, local students attend the North Lamar Independent School District, and all of Lamar County lies in the service area of Paris Junior College.