Welcome to the City of New Boston, Texas and their official website. New Boston is Home to the New Boston Lions.

The City of New Boston is located 21 miles west of Texarkana on Interstate 30, mile marker 201.

New Boston is on U.S. Highway 82 and the Missouri Pacific Railroad twenty-one miles west of Texarkana in the central part of Bowie County. The railroad was constructed four miles north of Boston in the summer of 1876, business owners in Boston (now Old Boston) felt it would suffer a serious decline as a consequence of its distance from the line. At a mass meeting J. H. Smelser, a local resident and surveyor for the railroad, was selected to meet with railroad officials to secure the location of a depot at a point on the line nearest to Boston. The negotiations were successful, and in September 1876 the railroad had purchased one hundred acres. Because those engaged in the project were from Boston, the new town was named New Boston. The post office was established in 1877 with L. C. DeMorse as postmaster. By 1884, New Boston had four hundred residents, two churches, a school, several mills and gins, and a newspaper, the New Boston Herald, edited by W. W. West. A furniture factory and another newspaper, the Bowie County Populist, were added in the 1890s.

By 1900 the town had a population of 762. It grew slowly until the late 1920s, when a short-lived boom raised the population from 869 to 1,300 by 1929. During World War II the Lone Star Army Ammunition Plant and the Red River Army Depot were constructed just southeast of New Boston. The two massive military installations were responsible for the town's rapid growth in the 1940s. The population grew from 1,111 in 1940 to 2,688 by 1950. In 1980 it reached 4,628. A large paper mill and smaller factories provided somewhat of an industrial base for the town, however in 1987 New Boston was heavily dependent on the two military installations for its continued prosperity. The town’s population had grown to 5,057 residents in 1990.

In March of 1986, a new county courthouse was dedicated to New Boston, but Boston remained the official county seat. The old Bowie County Courthouse, constructed in Boston in 1889, was abandoned after construction of the new building. On August 13, 1987, the old courthouse was burned and proven to have been set by an arsonist.

New Boston’s current population, as of the 2024 census, is 4,548.

City of New Boston

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