TRINIDAD — How long can the Oregon standoff last? If the one that dragged on in this rural East Texas town is any example, the answer is at least a decade, and perhaps much longer.

In a wooded 47-acre compound on the Trinity River about an hour southeast of Dallas, John Joe Gray, 66, quietly carried out what some call the longest standoff in America — a few days shy of 15 years. It officially ended in 2014 when a district attorney dropped charges, but it continued nonetheless because Gray and many law-enforcement officials appeared to be unaware the charges had been dropped until they were told by a reporter recently.

Gray, a carpenter linked to anti-government militia groups, was charged with assaulting a state trooper after a December 1999 traffic stop and was jailed, but he was released on bond in January 2000. He never showed up to court, instead returning to his property, where he and his relatives armed themselves and patrolled the barbed-wire fences. In a letter, he warned local officials that if they wanted to come get him, they needed to “bring body bags.”

The authorities heeded his warning. For more than a decade, Gray was a fugitive hiding in plain sight, never leaving the compound even after the power was cut off and living off the grid there with his wife and an extended family that includes several children. Gray’s standoff was unprecedented, yet it unfolded for the most part without incident.

The sheriff of Henderson County, Ray Nutt, monitored Gray’s property over the years but left him alone. Gray’s supporters dropped off food and supplies. Reporters pulled up to the main gate. But there were no major confrontations with law enforcement.

“My nature is to want to go out there and get him every day I’ve been in office, but then you got to start weighing the lives that might be lost over this,” said Nutt, a former Texas Ranger who in February 1993 was dispatched to Waco, where a federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound led to a standoff that left 86 people dead.

Gray’s standoff is technically over. It ended in December 2014, when Douglas Lowe, at the time the district attorney in nearby Anderson County, dismissed the felony assault charge against Gray before leaving office.

“I didn’t do that to concede victory to that guy,” Lowe said. “It had been going on for 15 years, and somebody just had to make a decision that it was time to say it’s over.”

Yet few people were aware that the charge had been dismissed, including Nutt. Informed of the dismissal, he promptly called the district attorney’s office. After confirming the dismissal, he hung up the phone in his office in nearby Athens and expressed both surprise and relief. Gray’s standoff had lasted through the administrations of four sheriffs.

“The decision not to go in feels more like the right decision now,” the sheriff said. “He actually could walk out tomorrow and be a free man. We ain’t got nothing to arrest him for. He’s no longer a fugitive.”

Still, out on Old River Road at the compound, there was no sign that anything was over.

Gray’s entrance gate is a clutter of religious and anti-government messages and warnings to keep out. One wooden sign on a tree reads, “Howdy Now Git.” A hangman’s noose dangles from a tree branch, a sign beneath it reading, “Solution to Tyranny.”

On Wednesday, a man and woman approached the gate, both armed. They were told of the sheriff’s comments that Gray was no longer a fugitive.

“We can’t believe anything they say, and we can’t believe anything y’all reporters say,” the woman said.

Manny Fernandez,

The New York Times