Wiess Bluff

Simon Wiess opened a general store at what was then Grant's Bluff in January 1840, and the Handbook of Texas calls the townsite a failure but the store a major business success. The entry says it drew most of the Neches valley's trade in the mid-1800s because it sat at the head of low-water navigation and the road to Jasper. The Confederacy made it a depot for military stores. Railroads in 1883 and the mid-1890s cut into its role as a river port.

What the plaque says

Wiess Bluff End of tidewater navigation of Neches River; called Grant's Bluff in 1840, when Niles F. Smith laid out town and Simon Wiess (1800-68) built wharf and warehouses to ship area products downriver. Post office, established in 1847 at Pattillo's, in Jefferson County, was moved here July 21, 1853. Area flourished about 1885, when J. G. Smyth & Co. built tram roads into forest and began to cut timber. Beaumont Lumber Co. bought out Smyth in 1888. As good timberland dwindled after 1900, local population declined. The Wiess Bluff Post Office closed Sept. 15, 1908. (1973)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Village Creek State Park — 4.1 mi
  A 2,466-acre state park on one of the few free-flowing creeks in Texas, with a launch for the Village Creek Paddling Trail, boat rentals and sandy-upland trails in the Big Thicket.
• McFaddin-Ward House — 12 mi
  A Beaux-Arts Colonial Revival mansion finished in 1906 and lived in by one family for 75 years, with free guided tours of three furnished floors, the carriage house and gardens.
• Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum — 16 mi
  A re-created oil boomtown on the Lamar University campus, with a derrick, period shops, a 1941 granite monument and an optional re-enactment of the January 1901 Lucas gusher.
• Big Thicket National Preserve — 22 mi
  Start at the Kountze visitor center, where rangers sort the preserve's scattered units for you, and learn why Congress made this 1974 string of pearls the country's first national preserve.

More markers nearby

• William Williamson — 4.7 mi
• Site of Former Settlement of Richardson's Bluff — 6.4 mi
• Harvey Houses of Silsbee — 8.1 mi
• Site of Collier's Ferry — 8.7 mi