MOSS BLUFF, TEXAS. Moss Bluff is on Farm Road 563 forty-five miles southwest of Beaumont in extreme southern Liberty County. Historian Herbert E. Bolton believed the site was near what eighteenth-century Spanish explorers knew as Los Horconsitos. Anglos, however, named the community for early settler Nathaniel Moss. The site was developed as a landing on the Trinity River. The community lost its bid to be the seat of government of the Liberty District in 1831. It nonetheless had gristmills and sawmills in 1840. At the onset of the Civil War, local planter Ashley W. Spaight organized the Moss Bluff Rebels, a company of volunteers. After the war, the growth of rice and cotton agriculture in the area temporarily reversed the community's decline. Its population fell from 400 in 1880 to seventy-five in 1890 and to twenty in 1910. The post office, established in 1869, was discontinued in 1930. The Moss Bluff dome, discovered in 1926, began yielding crude oil at the Moss Bluff field in 1950. By the early 1980s the estimated population of Moss Bluff had grown to sixty-five, at which level it remained through 2000.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Miriam Partlow, Liberty, Liberty County, and the Atascosito District (Austin: Pemberton, 1974).
