EVERGREEN, TEXAS (Titus County). Evergreen was a black community between White Oak Creek and the Sulphur River, fourteen miles northwest of Mount Pleasant in northwestern Titus County. Until the 1940s the area between White Oak Creek and Sulphur River, known locally as simply "between the creeks," was an isolated, heavily wooded area generally considered inferior for farming. The roads into the locale were poor, and inhabitants had few contacts with other parts of the county. Evergreen had its origins in the mid-1870s when Green Logan homesteaded land in the area. He was soon joined by Mose Price, Abe Daughtry, and other blacks who were able to purchase land nearby. As a community began to emerge Logan conceived of it as an area where other less fortunate blacks could find shelter and refuge from persecution or hard times. He named the community Evergreen, taking the green from his first name and adding ever to symbolize the idea of permanence.
The community grew until, by the early years of the twentieth century, it had a church, a school, a gin, and a store. The settlement seems to have always been small, since most of the area's inhabitants lived on the farms they had cleared in the dense woods. By the 1920s Evergreen began to decline, as residents took advantage of opportunities elsewhere. The local school, which was operated by the trustees of the Wilkinson common school district, was still in operation in the 1940s but had closed by 1973. By the mid-1970s the site was a part of a large ranch, and only the Evergreen Cemetery remained to mark the spot.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Deborah Brown and Katharine Gust, Between the Creeks: Recollections of Northeast Texas (Austin: Encino, 1976). John Marion Ellis II, The Way It Was: A Personal Memoir of Family Life in East Texas (Waco: Texian Press, 1983). Traylor Russell, History of Titus County (2 vols., Waco: Morrison, 1965, 1966; rpt., n.p.: Walsworth, 1975).
