page_title: Lufkin, Texas
section_title: Recent history
hierarchical_section_title: Lufkin, Texas / History / Recent history
caption_attribution_description: English: February 8, 2003. First Baptist Church, Lufkin, Texas. Reverend Robert L. Bush, Pastor, First Church of the Nazarene delivers an Invocation. NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe, Governor of Texas Rick Perry, and NASA Astronaut Jeff Ashby participated in a memorial service to honor the Space Shuttle Columbia astronauts. O'Keefe thanked the community of Lufkin for their support and honored the crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia.
context_page_description: Lufkin is a city in Angelina County, Texas, and is the county seat and largest city of Angelina County. The city is situated in Deep East Texas, and is 115 miles northeast of Houston. The estimated population is 35,021 as of July 1, 2019.
  Lufkin was founded in 1884 and named for Abraham P. Lufkin. It originally served as a stop on the Houston, East and West Texas Railway. It was officially incorporated on October 15, 1890. Lufkin continued to serve as a stop on the railroad until the 1890. 3 businessmen founded Angelina Lumber Company which led to much of the economic prosperity Lufkin would see later in history. When the so-called "timber boom" came to an end a new "golden era of expansion" began. This era saw Lufkin becoming more industrialized with the opening of Lufkin Industries and Southland Paper Mill. In the mid 1960s, a cultural expansion began and improvements were made to education and the way of life. This included museums and the opening of a new library.
context_section_description: Debris from the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster fell over the Lufkin area on February 1, 2003.
caption: Thousands gather at the Columbia memorial in Lufkin 2019
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