July 7, 2025
I really enjoy rock hunting. In fact, I have to exercise restraint to not pick up every pretty rock I see. My father was an avid rockhound, going so far as to buy multiple truckloads of gravel “for the driveway” only to spend hours every evening he could picking through the piles for the prettiest pieces. He polished many and made jewelry with them (which we sold at local shops), but the majority of material was stored away for future projects. I honestly think that the structural integrity of our house was affected by the many boxes of rocks he stored in his attic workshop.
I also think Kristi is a bit of a rockhound at heart, too. She has a really good eye for finding nice specimens and is nearly as enthusiastic about hunting for them as I am when we go out.
So, when we were on vacation I picked up a copy of Rockhounding Texas, by Martin Freed and Ruta Vaskys, to find new-to-us sites nearby. In addition to pointing out a few promising locations, the book also made me aware of some dirt roads in Houston County that had previously escaped my attention.
Our rock hunting adventure started in Crockett, Texas on Loop 304. We took FM 2712 southeast to County Road 4020, also called Lovelady Road, which the book claimed to be a good site for finding jasper, petrified wood, and marine fossils. We were not disappointed!
Route: Rock Hunting in Houston County
CR 4020 runs almost straight south through dense woods and open pastures. It is narrow but well maintained and shouldn’t present a problem to any vehicle with average ground clearance. We stopped at a location not far from the start where many rocks were visible in the ditches and the road was wide enough for us to pull over a little.
The image above shows a wide variety of rocks with varied origins. While some of them are from the surrounding soils, I believe that the limestone roadbed was trucked in from somewhere else–likely a nearby quarry. The large red rocks appeared to be broken bricks that had been mixed in with the road aggregate.
But where did the local rocks come from? East Texas is not exactly a hotspot of rock formation, is it? Well, no. Mostly.
To understand the geology of the south-eastern half of Texas, we have to go back many millions of years. Most of the state was under water for long periods of time, either under the interior seas that have long since vanished, or under the warm, shallow waters of the ancestral Gulf. Limestone and sandstone formed on the seabed, and gravel and sediments washed down by ancient river systems from even older mountains and volcanoes further inland were deposited in vast deltas, slowly building up the shoreline to its present location.
During the Eocene epoch, about 34 to 56 million years ago, Earth was experiencing one of the warmest periods in its history. The water cycle was in high gear, and the abundant rain that washed the gravels and sediments into the ancestral Gulf also carried a great quantity of iron. This iron settled in the soil and in the warm, shallow sea forming deposits of limonite and other iron ores. It was also during this time that the geologic formations that compose present-day Houston County were created.
Wood from trees and similar plants that grew during the Eocene was occasionally buried. The organic matter was eventually replaced with minerals from the soil as the wood decayed, forming petrified wood.
The above is a gross over-simplification of the processes that brought or created the rocks we find in East Texas. A couple of things to take away from the explanation, though, is that some of the rocks we find on the surface today were formed very far away a very long time ago, and other rocks (petrified wood and iron ores such as limonite and siderite) formed more-or-less in situ.
We didn’t stay long at the first stop on CR 4020 because there were people living nearby. But I did pick up a few interesting specimens. We drove a little further and stopped at a location in the woods. Here, we found several pieces of jasper and a lot of marine fossils–mostly bivalves. The fossils appeared to be part of the limestone used to build up the roadbed.
And what’s a dirt road adventure without finding an interesting bit of history tucked away somewhere? Houston County seems to have an endless number of places of historical interest. One could throw a rock, native or otherwise, and wherever it landed would have a story!
Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church immediately caught our attention when we came out of a densely wooded section of the road. It sits at the junction of County Roads 4020 and 4015.
Standing next to the church is an enormous hickory tree. I have no idea how old this one is, but hickory trees can live up to at least 300 years.
Sitting next door to the church is what remains of the Post Oak School, which served the area from the early 1890s to the mid-1950s. I wish we could have looked inside, but the building didn’t look safe, and I was concerned that we’d be trespassing.
Moving along, we continued down CR 4020. The road is very narrow for its whole length, and recent rain had filled the ditches with water. Thankfully there wasn’t much traffic along the way, so we didn’t have to pull over for anyone.
CR 4020 meets CR 4035 at Box Creek and turns west. Both roads share a bridge across the creek and then CR 4020 turns and continues south on the other side.
The section just past where CR 4020 turns south from CR 4035 was the roughest portion of the route. There was a washout leading down to the creek, but it was easy to drive around it. Box Creek parallels the road on the east side (left) for a short distance.
CR 4020 felt remote, in general, but most of the section south of Box Creek felt like it was WAY out in the country. In reality, TX-19 was less than a couple of miles away to the west.
Parts of the road reminded me of driving down a well-maintained forest service road.
About halfway between Box Creek and the end of the road we came to Center Hill Cemetery, located at the junction of CR 4040 (Centerhill Cemetery Rd). There were quite a few nice pieces of petrified wood along the roadside here.
It’s reasonable to deduce from the historical marker that the Ellis’ were a prolific bunch! According to Find a Grave, Charles’ first wife, Elizabeth, was the sister of Cyrus Lovelady, for whom the nearby town of Lovelady was named.
A storm was brewing nearby, so we didn’t stay to explore the cemetery. Moving on we completed the last leg of the drive down CR 4020, which ends on TX-19 next to Lovelady School.
I cleaned up the rocks as soon as we got home. We had some great finds! In the picture below the petrified woods are on the left, and four jaspers are in a row on the lower right. To the left of the jaspers is a piece of limonite, and just above it and to the right a little is a piece of limestone covered in colorful calcite crystals. Several marine fossils are in the upper right. And in the middle is the Mystery Rock. We don’t know what it is, but it’s covered in little spots.
Below are close-ups of my favorite finds.
We left plenty of rocks for someone else to find. But I may go back and look for some more jasper and petrified wood. There were lots of pieces in the ditches, and hunting for them might be easier when it is drier.