CAMP RUBY, TEXAS. Camp Ruby, also known as Ruby, is on

Farm Road 1276 sixty-five miles northwest of Beaumont in south central

Polk County. A community was established at the site before the Civil

War;qv by 1880 residents referred to it as Old Hope. A temporary post

office, named Rhoden, was opened in the summer of 1880. Another

post office, called Charity, was in operation from 1896 to 1911. The site

was renamed Camp Ruby when the W. T. Carter and Brother Lumber

Company established a logging camp there in 1926. According to local

lore, A. B. Clayton was sent to select a good site; having chosen the

heavily wooded area of Old Hope, Clayton renamed it after an

acquaintance named Ruby Moore. The location became a major logging

camp for the Carter sawmills. A tram line linked Camp Ruby to

Camden, which lay on the Moscow, Camden and San Augustine

Railroad. As the timber around Camp Ruby was cut out, the Carter

Lumber Company shifted logging operations to other areas. Camp

Ruby's population thus dwindled to about twenty-five by the early

1940s. The completion of U.S. Highway 190 led many of the residents

to move two miles west to a community called New Camp Ruby on the

highway. The Camp Ruby oilfield, discovered in the mid-1960s, has

yielded moderate amounts of oil and natural gas, and additional

discoveries were made in the early 1980s. Camp Ruby's voting box was

restored on May 26, 1969. In 1990 the population was thirty-five.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: History of Polk County (2 vols., Livingston, Texas:

Keen Printing, 1968). A Pictorial History of Polk County, Texas,

1846-1910 (Livingston, Texas: Polk County Bicentennial Commission,

1976; rev. ed. 1978).

Robert Wooster