Evadale was Ford's Bluff before the mill name stuck

Evadale sits in southwest Jasper County at U.S. 96 and farm roads 105, 1131, and 2246. Long before that road junction made sense, the place was known as Richardson's Bluff for Benjamin Richardson, who operated a ferry on the Neches River and served as postmaster in 1839.

After Richardson died in 1849, the land passed to members of the Ford family, and the site was often called Ford's Bluff. That bluff became useful because logs could be gathered there and floated down the river to Beaumont mills. John Henry Kirby later rebuilt a tram line between Ford's Bluff and Buna as part of his larger railroad project, then renamed the place for Eva Dale, a teacher at Jasper's Southeast Texas Male and Female College.

The name is soft, but the history is muscular: ferry, bluff, logs, rail, mill. Champion Paper and Fiber Company bought riverfront acreage for a pulp mill in 1948, and by the 1970s the Temple-Eastex pulpwood and paper mill dominated Evadale's economy. The Neches is not scenery here. It is the reason the place made sense.