SILSBEE, Texas – There’s a lost road in Hardin County. Unlike many forgotten stretches of road, Old Town Bluff Road didn’t survive to be paved or even graveled.
It disappeared long before cities took to improving roads and might have remained forgotten if a woman hadn’t questioned the burial of a long-dead relative.
As Susan Shine Kilcrease researched the Bozeman Graveyard in Silsbee, she wondered why her several-greats grandfather would have buried a baby there.
Eli Chance, whom Chance Cut-off is named for, lived at Baby Galvez, which was two miles from the cemetery.
“Why is that cemetery where it is? Why would they have built that cemetery out in the woods? Nobody lived there. Why would he have buried her out in the woods?” Kilcrease remembered asking her father, Darrell Shine, who is a surveyor and historian in Hardin County.
Given that this was in the 1840s, burying a relative that far away, when there were plenty of wild animals in the woods, didn’t seem reasonable to Kilcrease.
Kilcrease’s father remembered a 95-year-old man who in 1950 told him about taking a trip from Town Bluff to Beaumont.
The trip took two days in a wagon and carried the man across Village Creek at Cook’s Bluff and Pine Island Bayou at Old Concord. The man told Darrell Shine he believed he traveled on Old Town Bluff Road.
Further research found that a north-south road was clearly marked on historic maps, the earliest dated 1835, Kilcrease said.
The road went from San Augustine to Sabine Pass, and probably passed right by the Bozeman Graveyard, which is located between Railroad, Bonner and McKinney streets in Silsbee.
“John Henry Kirby would have built the mill by the road, and they would have built the railroad by the road, that’s what they did back then,” Kilcrease said. “The interesting part about this road is that it had just about disappeared from history.”
Though the road has disappeared, Kilcrease said it could have been in use for much longer than anyone realizes.
“There is a very good possibility that road could have existed into the 1900s,” she said, adding that although the ferry crossing was established in the 1830s, people were most likely forging the river at that spot much earlier. “If the ferry was there, the road was already there.”
A Nov. 22, 1936 Works Progress Administration article about Silsbee mentioned the road, proving that it did once exist.
“Town Bluff Road, which once ran through the middle of the town, was one of the oldest and most traveled roads in the country at an early date,” the article said. The road was said to run south from Town Bluff on the Neches River in Tyler County, through Spurger, Silsbee, Cook’s Bluff, Fletcher and all the way to Beaumont.
“County and state roads are now on parts of this old road bed,” the article adds.
Travelers on the road often camped on a bluff where the Steep Hollows ended in Hardin County. At the bottom of the bluff, the WPA article said, a “beautiful big spring of crystal-clear water” was located.
Regardless, Town Bluff Road was apparently the road less traveled.
The major north-south road running through Hardin County in the late 1800s was the Liberty to Nacogdoches road, according to “The Hardin County History.” The book mentions Town Bluff Road as taking the “right-hand fork.”