EAST TEMPE, TEXAS. East Tempe is on Farm Road 350 seventy-five miles north of Houston in west central Polk County. The settlement was named after East Tempe Creek, a stream that cuts through the area. Settlers were farming the surrounding lands by 1860; some twenty years later a sawmill had been erected. Further development came in 1908 at the completion of the Beaumont and Great Northern Railway, which connected East Tempe with Trinity to the north and Livingston to the southeast. East Tempe became a flag stop on the railroad. Although the railroad was abandoned in 1949, East Tempe remains an outlying community of Livingston. In 1990 the population was estimated at 100 and in 2000 it was 200.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: A Pictorial History of Polk County, Texas, 1846-1910 (Livingston, Texas: Polk County Bicentennial Commission, 1976; rev. ed. 1978). Charles P. Zlatkovich, Texas Railroads (Austin: University of Texas Bureau of Business Research, 1981).

Robert Wooster