The county's first Anglo settlers were what John Nova Lomax described as "Scotch-Irish backwoods folk." Cotton farmers and slaves did not come to Angelina County because it had poor soil. Lomax added that "Culturally, the county was less moonlight-and-magnolias Dixie than a little pocket of Appalachia, where pioneers, often from similarly hardscrabble areas of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, wanted nothing more than to carve homesteads out of the Piney Woods and river thickets, farm a little, maybe raise a scraggly herd of tough cattle to drive to market in New Orleans." Lomax added that "hey also wanted to brew up a little whiskey and subsist on the bass, catfish and perch they hauled from the Neches and Angelina rivers and whatever they could trap and shoot on dry land."