KICKAPOO, TEXAS (Anderson County). Kickapoo was on Kickapoo Creek twenty miles northeast of Palestine and ten miles north of Neches in northeastern Anderson County. The community was settled about 1848, and it and a nearby creek and mountain were presumably named for the Kickapoo Indians who camped in that region. A post office was opened in the community in 1850, and an ironworks was in operation nearby before the Civil War but was abandoned during the war. By 1884 Kickapoo had a church, a school, a saloon, two general stores, and an estimated population of 100. The church was also used as a meetinghouse for the local Masonic lodge. Kickapoo began to decline in the 1880s and 1890s. In 1892 it had a general store and a flour mill and its population was estimated at twenty-five. The school was closed by 1897, and when the railroad bypassed the community in 1900, many of the inhabitants moved to nearby Frankston, the closest community on the railroad line. The Kickapoo post office closed in 1905, and the community was not shown on county highway maps in the 1930s.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Pauline Buck Hohes, A Centennial History of Anderson County, Texas (San Antonio: Naylor, 1936). Palestine Daily Herald, February 12, 1935.
