Talco is a city in Titus County, Texas, in the northeastern part of the state, north of Mount Pleasant near the Red River County line. Its population was 494 at the 2020 census. The town's most distinctive feature is its name: Talco was coined from the initials of the Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana Candy Company, taken from a candy-bar wrapper by a local merchant when the community sought a new post office name. That origin gives Talco one of the more memorable place-name stories in East Texas. The community's fortunes rose with the oilfield. Talco grew into a twentieth-century boomtown tied to the East Texas oil industry, and by 1960 it was one of the two largest towns in Titus County, with roughly 1,250 residents alongside the county seat of Mount Pleasant. Oil and gas production, along with agriculture and timber, have remained central to the local economy, and the town's population has since settled to a small-town scale. Talco is served by Rivercrest Independent School District, a consolidated rural district based in nearby Bogata in Red River County that maintains a campus in Talco. That arrangement reflects the close ties between communities along the Titus-Red River county line. The city sits along U.S. Highway 271, which connects it to Mount Pleasant to the south and Bogata and Paris to the north, while Interstate 30 through Mount Pleasant links the region to Dallas-Fort Worth and Texarkana. For residents, Talco offers a quiet, inexpensive setting within a short drive of Mount Pleasant, which provides the region's employment, retail, and medical services. The surrounding countryside is a patchwork of farmland, pasture, and East Texas timberland, with lakes and state parks of the region within easy reach. Talco's identity rests on the oilfield, its candy-wrapper name, and the agricultural and timber landscape of northeast Texas.