Moscow is an unincorporated community in Polk County, Texas, set in the Piney Woods of East Texas at the junction of U.S. Highway 59 and Farm Road 350, just west of the county seat of Livingston. Its name is one of the more surprising on the Texas map: the settlement was first known as Greenville when David and Matilda Green arrived in the 1840s, but postal authorities found that name too close to other Texas towns, and in 1853 it was renamed Moscow, after the city in Russia. For a time, Moscow was a place of real consequence. It incorporated in 1856 and grew into a trading center for farmers and a stage stop on the Liberty-Nacogdoches Road. The Houston East and West Texas Railway arrived in the late nineteenth century, and sawmills, a cannery, and a column factory supported a logging economy that made Moscow, with about 228 residents in 1880, the largest town in Polk County. Its population peaked near 263 around 1900. The lumber boom did not last. As the region's timber was cut over, the mills declined, and Moscow settled into a quiet rural crossroads. Its population has held around 170 for decades, and the community today is a small cluster of homes and farmland surrounded by forest. Its location on U.S. Highway 59 keeps it connected to Livingston and the wider East Texas region, while nearby Lake Livingston and the Sam Houston National Forest anchor the surrounding recreation. For those drawn to the Piney Woods' unhurried countryside and its layered history, Moscow is a distinctive, low-density setting.