BEREA, TEXAS (Marion County). Berea is on Farm Road 728 four miles northwest of Jefferson in central Marion County. It was founded as a Seventh-day Adventist colony about 1914. In 1962 the community had a Seventh-day Adventist church, a cemetery, a number of dwellings, and the Jefferson Rural Academy, an Adventist school. Berea had a population of 142 in the 1960s and seventy-four in the 1970s. In 1989 Jefferson Seventh-day Adventist Academy had approximately forty pupils, and the community had a grocery store, a church, an elementary school, a number of homes, and a population estimated by one local resident at 250. The official count in 2000 was seventy-four.

Mark Odintz