Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Near Downtown Timpson Timpson, TX

Timpson is a city in Shelby County, deep in the Piney Woods of East Texas, at the convergence of U.S. Route 59 - the future Interstate 69 corridor - and U.S. Route 84.

Timpson was founded in 1885 upon the arrival of the Houston, East and West Texas Railway, and the first passenger train rolled into the new town on August 1, 1885.

According to its Texas Historical Commission marker, the town was named for Paul C. Timpson, the railroad official who laid out the townsite.

Timpson grew fast - within a year of its founding it had about 1,000 residents, a school, churches, a newspaper, banks, and factories, and it became an important East Texas lumber, cotton, and rail center.

Like many railroad towns, Timpson was laid out along the tracks rather than on a north-south grid, and the survey map adopted when the town incorporated remains its official map today.

Timpson reached its maximum population in 1925, when it was a key shipping point for lignite.

Timpson is one of the four Shelby County towns strung together in Tex Ritter's song 'Tenaha, Timpson, Bobo, and Blair' - a chant that began as a World War I cadence call among Shelby County soldiers and became a famous crapshooters' expression for rolling a ten.

The 2020 census counted 989 people in Timpson, living in 412 households and 279 families, with 514 housing units in the city.

Public education in Timpson is provided by the Timpson Independent School District, home of the Timpson High School Bears.

Lake Timpson, a reservoir on Blackwater Creek just outside town whose dam was completed in 1956, is used for recreation and is managed by the Shelby County Fresh Water Supply District No. 1.