The early Indian tribes who visited the "Big Thicket", probably called it the "Big Woods". The Big Thicket was probably named the "Big Thicket" by the white settlers because if was "big" and the term "thicket" was correct because it was a "thicket". In fact, it is still so thick in places you better have a compass if you venture very far off the beaten path.

Dr. Frances Abernethy, Professor of English at Stephen F. Austin University at Nacogdoches, wrote "few books are able to catch the spirit as well as the sound of a place, especially when that place has as strong an identity and personality as the Big Thicket has". He was, of course, referring to a book "The Big Thicket Legacy", edited by Campbell and Lyn Loughmiller. Francis Abernethy, you could say, has been "in love" with the Big Thicket, the people, the tales and the history of it since away back when.

And so it is with the "Big Thicket" of Hardin County, Texas. No one can do justice to it just by writing a book or reading a book. You have to see it, tramp through it (where you can), smell it and talk to its inhabitants, to get the "feel" of it.

There have been many books and articles written about "it" including the Loughmillers, Dr. Francis Abernethy, Aline House, Ralph Ramos and others. I believe Ralph Ramos brought the real thicket, real history, real people and real events to us as well as anyone. And that's not taking anything away from the other writers.

There are about as many stories about where the real Big Thicket is as there are of what's in it. In the early days it was described as a vast area of virgin yellow pine timber three to five feet in diameter, as well as virgin forests of hardwood trees, such as ash, hickory, white, oak, walnut and others.

When the early pioneers moved west and crossed the Sabine and Neches Rivers, they found a forest so thick in places they could not get through it, so they settled around the edges, along Village Creek to the north, Pine Island Bayou to the south, and westward toward the Trinity River bottom. The early Indian tribes used their canoes or dugouts to penetrate parts of the thicket. It is estimated that the original Big Thicket contained up to 4 million acres of impenetrable undergrowth, great areas of hardwood trees, savannas, wet lands, bogs, baygalls, sandy lands, as well as prairies and palmetto flats.

The Big Thicket area has been called the "Biological Crossroads of America", because of the great diverse areas of vegetation that make up this unique area. It is the only area of its kind in the world, according to biologists, who come to Hardin County from all over the world to study it.

The thicket contained the greatest variety of plants of any comparable area in the United States. It is an island of many species that are not found within hundreds of miles in any direction. There is the Desert Cactus, giant Palmetto, Tumbleweeds, Yucca Plants and bald Cypress and Magnolia. The thicket seems to have all the necessary elements conducive to the growth of all these different types of plants. Around the outer edges of the thicket were some of the finest virgin yellow longleaf pine forests found in the world.

The Big Thicket contains so many varieties of plant life, species of birds, varieties of flowering and wild shrubs, species of trees, different kinds of wild orchids and species of ferns that the biologists will probably never be able to identify all of them.

What is left of the original Big Thicket, the "Tight Eye" Thicket, of the "Bear Hunter's" Thicket is still thick and the "inside" of the thicket is still as mysterious as it was when the first white settlers came to live and plant their crops and still their moonshine. You never know what you will run into, see or hear when you enter the Big Thicket. The old buck deer still leaves his scrapes along the dim trail; and the wild hogs are still there rooting for mast in the Pin Oak Flats.

As Aline House, Librarian and Historian at Kountze High School one said, "some of the most colorful stories have been published as random newspaper features, and there is a definite need for all these to be collected and made available. The sturdy settlers, who were here from the beginning and their direct descendants who grew up with the county, are rapidly disappearing. It would be a tragedy to let their stories become distorted and dimmed by the passing of time, for it is the human element that gives life to history and makes it more than a listing of dates and statistics".