Tigertown, TX (Lamar County)

Tigertown is on Sanders Creek sixteen miles northwest of Paris in northwest Lamar County. The community was named Cothran's Store, for an early family, and used as a voting place for Precinct Five in county elections for 1873. It had a post office from 1878 to 1905. At the same time the community was also known as Tigertown or Tige, supposedly because of a circus poster in a saloon. In 1890 the community had a population of seventy-five, a hotel, a grocery, and a gristmill. By 1892 it had two general stores, a cotton gin, two physicians, and Methodist and Presbyterian churches. Four years later a district school was located in the community. Maps of the 1930s show rows of dwellings, at least two sawmills, a hotel, a cemetery, and Tigertown School at the site. By 1936 the population had fallen to forty and the businesses to two; they stayed at this level through the 1940s. In 1989 Tigertown appeared on highway maps that showed a grain elevator, a school, a cemetery, and one business on the site.