Huffman, Texas - A Local Area Guide
How Huffman grew from a farming settlement to a Lake Houston community
More about this in Huffman
Huffman sits about 25 miles northeast of downtown Houston, centered on Farm to Market Roads 2100 and 1960, in the Piney Woods of northeastern Harris County. It's an unincorporated community of roughly 12,000 people spread across 39 square miles of subdivisions, scattered farms and acreage rather than one dense town center. This page is a plain guide to that place, written for anyone who wants to understand Huffman before reading anything else on this site. For the full record, the Huffman, Texas page on Wikipedia is a good starting point.
Where the name and the land came from
Huffman takes its name from David Huffman, a Louisiana native who came to Texas to fight against Mexico during the Texas Revolution and later settled this stretch of prairie and pine forest. The community's early economy ran on farming, ranching and logging, with cotton, rice and corn as the main crops. A post office opened in the community in 1888, and by 1892 two blacksmith shops were doing business — the marks of a settled farming town rather than a passing camp.
From rice and cotton to oil and a reservoir
The Beaumont, Sour Lake and Western Railway reached the area in the early 1900s, and by 1914 Huffman had two general stores and a population of 250. The Sinclair Oil pump station, built in 1921, brought an industrial presence into what had been an entirely agricultural economy. The community's modern shape owes the most, though, to 1953, when Lake Houston opened as a water reservoir for the City of Houston — the lake that today gives Huffman's biggest subdivisions their names and their waterfront lots.
A history of flooding that repeats
Huffman's location near the East Fork of the San Jacinto River, just upstream of where it feeds Lake Houston, has made it one of the harder-hit communities in the region during major storms. 128 homes in Huffman flooded during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, and just two years later, Tropical Storm Imelda sent rescue crews back into the Lochshire neighborhood as water rose again. Residents interviewed after Imelda pointed out that some of the flooded homes had only recently finished repairs from Harvey.
The tree that predates all of it
Long before any of that development, or any of Huffman's floods, there was the Huffman Heritage Live Oak. The Texas Forestry Service determined the tree to be 314 years old as of 1989, standing 75 feet tall with a 135-foot crown spread — big enough to beat the Texas State Forestry Champion Live Oak at Goose Island State Park in two of three measured categories. It's a living marker of how long this particular patch of Piney Woods has stood.
What Huffman looks like today
Modern Huffman is a patchwork: named subdivisions like Lochshire, Huffman Hills, Cypress Point, Spanish Cove and Tayme Ranchettes sit alongside scattered farms and undeveloped acreage. Families send their kids through Huffman Independent School District — Huffman Elementary, Falcon Ridge Elementary, Huffman Middle School and Willie J. Hargrave High School — and gather at the 69-acre I.T. May Park on Wolf Road, with its eight lighted baseball fields and two football fields, for weekend games.
That is Huffman: a farming settlement turned lake community, still living with the water that both built it and, every few years, tries to take it back.