SABINE, TEXAS (Smith County). Sabine is 1½ miles south of the Sabine River, east of U.S. Highway 69, and three miles north of Lindale in extreme northern Smith County. Lindale Club Lake is southeast of Sabine and Mill Creek is to the south. By the 1840s the commercial activities of settlers from the South had established the Dallas-Shreveport Road, and the north loop of this thoroughfare ran through the area. The Sabine settlement, however, was not founded until 1899, when Rev. W. L. Pate organized the Sabine Methodist Church as part of his circuit. Joe Crane donated the land for the church, a cemetery, and a school. Brush arbor meetings were held there in the early days, and the church and school became the center of local activities. County records for 1903 showed that the Sabine School had one teacher and fifty-three white students. During the 1920s classes were held in a large one-story white frame structure, and the average enrollment was forty. The church remained active and in 1922 began to share a minister with the Lindale Methodist Church. By 1936 Sabine included a church, a school, and a small cluster of farms on bituminous and dirt roads. One elementary school had two teachers and forty-five white students, while the other, known as the Sabine-Saline school, had two teachers and seventy-six black students. By 1952 both schools had been consolidated into the Lindale Independent School District, along with other local rural schools. In 1960 Sabine had a church, a cemetery, and several scattered farms, but in 1969 the local congregation transferred to the Lindale Methodist Church. In 1981 the community included only a few dwellings.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Edward Clayton Curry, An Administrative Survey of the Schools of Smith County, Texas (M.Ed. thesis, University of Texas, 1938). "School Sights," Chronicles of Smith County, Fall 1969. Smith County Historical Society, Historical Atlas of Smith County (Tyler, Texas: Tyler Print Shop, 1965). Albert Woldert, A History of Tyler and Smith County (San Antonio: Naylor, 1948).
