East Texas

31°52′N 94°55′W / 31.867°N 94.917°W / 31.867; -94.917

East Texas
Region
From top, left to right: Downtown Tyler; Downtown Longview; Paris Commercial Historic District; Downtown Nacogdoches; Downtown Beaumont and Downtown Houston
East Texas counties in red; the inclusion of pink and red counties varies from source to source, thus may or may not be included in East Texas
Country	United States
State	Texas
Largest city	Houston
Population  (2020)
• Total	8,814,548

East Texas is a broadly defined cultural, geographic, and ecological region in the eastern part of the U.S. state of Texas that comprises most of 41 counties. It is primarily divided into Northeast and Southeast Texas. Most of the region consists of the Piney Woods ecoregion. East Texas can sometimes be defined only as the Piney Woods.^[1] At the fringes, towards Central Texas, the forests expand outward toward sparser trees and eventually into open plains.

According to the Handbook of Texas, the East Texas area "may be separated from the rest of Texas roughly by a line extending from the Red River in north-central Lamar County southwestward to east-central Limestone County and then southeastward towards eastern Galveston Bay". Most sources separate the Gulf Coast area into a separate region.^[2]

Another popular, somewhat simpler, definition defines East Texas as the region between the Trinity River, north and east of Houston (or sometimes Interstate 45, when defining generously) as the western border; the Louisiana border as the eastern border; the Gulf of Mexico as the southern border; the Oklahoma border as the northern border; Arkansas as the northeastern border, and extending as far south as Orange, Texas. The East Texas region includes Tyler, Longview, Texarkana, Lufkin, Marshall, Palestine, Henderson, Jacksonville, Mount Pleasant, and Nacogdoches as principal cities in addition to the Houston and Beaumont metropolitan statistical areas.