PINE, TEXAS. Pine is between the St. Louis Southwestern Railway and the junction of Farm Road 1522 and U.S. Highway 271, six miles south of Pittsburg in southern Camp County. Settlement in the area began in the late 1830s, and when the post office was established in 1848 it was named Pine Tree for the numerous pine trees growing nearby. The post office was closed in 1871. When the Texas and St. Louis Railway was constructed through the area in the late 1870s, a switch station was established in the settlement and named Cannon Switch, in honor of Burrell Cannon, a local minister and later president of the Ezekiel Airship Company. For a number of years the settlement was called Pine Tree, Pine, or Cannon Switch. When the post office was reopened in 1892 it was called Pine. By 1896 Pine had two churches, a lumber and shingle mill, and a population estimated at 100. The population began to decline during the early years of the twentieth century, and by 1925 it was estimated at fifty-five. By 1945 it had fallen to an estimated thirty, and the post office was closed in 1954. Although the population of the community had declined, the area was still heavily populated, at least through the 1930s. In 1935 for example, the Pine Common School District had two schools serving a combined scholastic population of 141 students. By 1955 the school district had been consolidated with the Pittsburg Independent School District. During the 1960s Pine began to grow again, and by 1970 the population was estimated at ninety-eight. From 1972 to 1990 the population of Pine was reported as seventy-eight; during those years the settlement had no rated businesses. In 1983 Pine had a church, a community center, and a small store. In 2000 the population was still reported as seventy-eight.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hollie Max Cummings, An Administrative Survey of the Schools of Camp County, Texas (M.A. thesis, University of Texas, 1937). Artemesia L. B. Spencer, The Camp County Story (Fort Worth: Branch-Smith, 1974).

Cecil Harper, Jr.