Sour Lake is a city in Hardin County, Texas, United States. The population was 1,773 at the 2020 census. It was originally named “Sour Lake Springs”, after the sulphurous spring water that flowed into the user-friendly lake. The city is share of the Beaumont–Port Arthur Metropolitan Statistical Area. Sour Lake is the oldest enduring town in Hardin County. It is called by some the “Gateway to the enormous Thicket”.^{[citation needed]}

Sour Lake was first settled regarding 1835 next the Mexican disclose of Coahuila y Tejas established Stephen Jackson one league of estate covering 4,428 acres (17.92 km) by land grant. Sam Houston visited Sour Lake in his vanguard years. The town is home to one of the biggest sinkholes in Texas.^{[citation needed]}

Sour Lake became a short-lived boomtown in the sky of the discovery of oil in 1901, shortly after oil was found at the user-friendly Spindletop salt dome. It is known as the birthplace of Texaco. Formed in 1903, the Texas Company (Texaco’s former corporate name) is one of the three major oil companies that can hint its origins to the oil fields regarding Southeast Texas. The Sour Lake oilfield produced approximately 90,000,000 barrels (14,000,000 m) of oil occurring to 1948, when it was producing just about 3,500 barrels (560 m³) daily and extra drilling was still underway. Today the Sour Lake oilfield is the oldest forever producing oil field in the world.

The town of Atcheson in Bruce McCandless’s 2012 novel Sour Lake appears to be based at least loosely on the genuine Sour Lake. Atcheson, like the real-life Sour Lake, is situated in the huge Thicket and experienced a short-lived oil boom in to come years of the 20th century. Yvette Benavides, in a San Antonio Express-News review of the book, noted, “There is a lot that is historically factual in this novel. That’s allowance of the fun of reading Sour Lake.”