BANNISTER, TEXAS. Bannister is at the intersection of a country road and State Highway 147 by Bannister Lake, thirteen miles southwest of San Augustine in southwestern San Augustine County. It grew up as a shipping point on the St. Louis Southwestern Railway in the 1890s and was granted a post office in 1914. In 1925 Bannister had fifty inhabitants, and in 1933 it had a business. The post office closed in 1925, the railroad was abandoned in the early 1930s, and by the 1940s Bannister was deserted, though the site was still marked as a triangulation point on state highway maps.