BANCROFT, TEXAS (Orange County). Bancroft is at the crossing of Interstate Highway 10 and the Missouri Pacific Railroad, twenty miles east of Beaumont in east central Orange County. The Bancroft-Roach subdivision plat was filed on September 15, 1903, and the community was named for the Bancroft family, influential in Orange County lumbering since the 1870s. The site was on the Orange and Northwestern Railway and served as a shipping point for lumber and rice. The Bancroft school district stubbornly resisted efforts to consolidate it with the Little Cypress and West Orange districts during the 1950s. Most of the community's residential areas had by 1974 been annexed by Orange, although several industrial and business sites remained outside the Orange city limits.