Place:Vidor, Orange, Texas, United States

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source: Family History Library Catalog

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Vidor is a city in western Orange County, Texas, United States. A city of Southeast Texas, it lies at the intersection of Interstate 10 and Farm to Market Road 105, east of Beaumont. The town is mainly a bedroom community for the nearby refining complexes in Beaumont and Port Arthur and is part of the Beaumont-Port Arthur metropolitan statistical area. Its population was 9,789 at the 2020 census.

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

The area was heavily logged after the construction of the Texarkana and Fort Smith Railway that was later part of a line that ran from Kansas City to Port Arthur, Texas. The city was named after lumberman Charles Shelton Vidor, owner of the Miller-Vidor Lumber Company and father of director King Vidor. By 1909, the Vidor community had a post office and four years later a company tram road was built. Almost all Vidor residents worked for the company. In 1924, the Miller-Vidor Lumber Company moved to Lakeview, just north of Vidor, in search of virgin timber. A small settlement remained and the Miller-Vidor subdivision was laid out in 1929..

Vidor had and still has a reputation as a "sundown town", where African Americans were not allowed after sunset. ^[1][2] In 1993, after a William Wayne Justice ordered that 36 counties in East Texas, including Vidor, desegregate public housing by making some units available for minorities, the Klan from another area held a march in the community after a long legal battle was lost by Vidor's leaders. Church leaders held a well attended prayer rally in opposition to the KKK hatred.^[3][4][5] After several minority families moved into the complex, the residents suffered racial threats including a bomb threat to the complex. Several families moved out under this pressure. One of the residents, Bill Simpson, was interviewed about his experience and how the issues were in the media and not the local people. He was killed in Beaumont, shortly after moving out of the complex.^[6] During the summer of 2020, Black Lives Matter held a rally in Vidor that was attended by a diverse crowd of 150–200 people.^[1][7]

In 2005, 2008, and 2017, Vidor and surrounding areas suffered extensive damage from Hurricanes Rita, Ike, and Harvey. A mandatory evacuation was imposed upon its residents for about two weeks.

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