FOUKE, TEXAS. Fouke is on Farm Road 2869 three miles northeast of Crow and less than a mile west of Lake Hawkins in southeast Wood County. A community called Center was said to exist in the southern part of the county as early as 1866, and sometime around 1873 the inhabitants built a log building, which was used for church, school, lodge, and community meetings. In 1879 a two-acre site for a Methodist Episcopal church was bought for six dollars, and a frame building was eventually constructed. At that time the pastor usually also taught the school, which was attended by black children only. The community's few white children went to subscription schools in Redland or Hawkins. A Center school district for blacks was established when Wood County was divided into public school districts in 1884, though by 1896 no records for that school exist. The predominantly black community never had a post office. The name was changed to Fouke sometime after 1885, when George W. Fouke's lumber company built a large sawmill in the area.
By the 1930s Fouke had a number of dwellings concentrated at the intersection of several bladed earth roads two miles north of U.S. Highway 80. The community also had a business, two churches, and a school, which in 1932 had an enrollment of seventeen white students and 111 black students. By 1960 the community had two churches and a few widely scattered dwellings. Sometime after 1960 Lake Hawkins was formed by a dam on the Little Sandy Creek, and by 1981 a number of new dwellings had appeared in the community, which supported two churches, two businesses, and a town hall or community center. In 2000 the population was thirty.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Wood County, 1850–1900 (Quitman, Texas: Wood County Historical Society, 1976).
