Seven Oaks

Seven Oaks is on U.S. Highway 59 eighty-eight miles north of Houston in central Polk County. It was named by an early settler for his ancestral estate in England. The completion of the Houston, East and West Texas Railway through central Polk County in 1880 led to the construction of numerous sawmills in the area. Bob, George, Dave, and Thomas Hackney built a mill at Seven Oaks, and the Hackney railroad station can be found on an 1888 railroad map. However, the Hackneys left in 1906, and C. N. Fisher and Lafayette Mason built another sawmill there. The new stop was called Seven Oaks by 1918. As locally available timber was cut out, the mills gradually closed. Though the Seven Oaks post office, established in 1886, was discontinued in 1925, Seven Oaks was incorporated on July 5, 1969, by a vote of thirty-nine to nineteen. In 1990 the population was 171. The population dropped to 131 in 2000.