Pioneer gateway to Texas opened into web of Indian trails traversing region
By HUDSON OLD
Journal Publisher
Jack Hooker's imagination follows overland trails, flows between centuries as if time's a path he can follow in either direction.
"I started hunting the most logical route James (Judge) Hooker traveled in the 1800's when he came down to Texas from Missouri," said Mr. Hooker, Judge Hooker's great great great grandson. Back in time along the traces, trails and roads Mr. Hooker's researched, just north of Texarkana, he ran across Sam Houston and Jim Bowie in the early 1830's, plotting the Texas Revolution in a bar in Washington.
Washington, Arkansas. Not Washington D.C.
Washington was on the Old Southwest Trail that angled up through Little Rock, then into St. Louis. Coming this way, it crossed the Red River at Jonesboro, 25 miles northwest of Clarksville.
"One of the first ports of entry into Texas for Anglo Americans," reads the Jonesboro historical marker, there at Sam Houston Park on Texas Farm to Market 410. "Opened as early as 1814; heavily used by 1817. Named for 1819-21 ferry owner Henry Jones."
It's likely that Judge Hooker, wife Elizabeth and the six children came down the Old Southwest Trail, a route that took on new significance in 1825 when President Andrew Jackson ordered the road improved to handle munition shipments to the garrison at Little Rock, Mr. Hooker reports.
Historians at "Old Washington" historical park say Sam Houston and Jim Bowie came into Texas at Jonesboro, intent on pushing revolution; Sam Houston and President Jackson were old army buddies, fighting alongside each other in the Creek and Seminole War, 1812-13. President Jackson's orders to ship munitions to Little Rock were timely for a President with a buddy dreaming of a new Texas nation, a plan that made war with Mexico a real possibility.
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The route became known as The Military Road. April of 1840 found Judge Hooker's family where it emptied into a web of Indian trails on the Texas side of the Red River. They stopped on the edge of "Blossom Prairie," at Maple Springs. Later, Maple Springs became Bogata, maybe "the oldest Anglo-American settlement in North Texas," according to the Handbook of Texas.
It's in Red River County, across Sulphur River from Talco, which wasn't there then.
Talco, I mean.
Neither was Titus County, as a properly named place.
Along the time trail, Judge Hooker was several years into his Texas citizenship before he became a judge.
Born in Tennessee in 1807, he and his brothers were workmen in wood, iron and leather. His brothers became wagon makers, blacksmiths and saddle makers. The Judge and his wife Elizabeth worked nights making shoes to supplement their income.
From Tennessee, the Judge moved to Calloway County, Missouri where he became a farmer and stockman. It's 600 miles from Calloway County to Blossom Prairie.
"At 18 miles a day, that's five weeks on the road," Mr. Hooker figures.
No motels.
There were camps and later, there were wagon yards in the towns along the trail. Wagon yards were real money makers, Mr. Hooker has discovered.
The land where Judge and Mrs. Hooker lived through the spring, summer and into the fall of 1840 was owned by James Humphries. Three years older than Judge Hooker, Mr. Humphries was born in Madison County, Tennessee, not far from the Hooker home. In the library at Bogata, Mr. Hooker found where a daughter of Mr. Humphries married a man from Calloway County, where Judge Hooker had come from.
"Maybe the Judge and Mr. Humpries knew each other before they came to Texas," said Mr. Hooker. Searching old trails, he's found lots of ferries among early service industries in the frontier / farming economy.
"Ferries were great businesses," he says. "Wagon camps operated along the trails and as the towns grew, liveries opened." Also, a man with a grist mill could generate cash flow.
Sometime between October of 1840 and May of 1842 Judge Hooker moved further into Texas, building a grist mill on the banks of the Sabine, 75 miles southwest of Blossom Prairie.
He could have started that trip by turning down the Cherokee Trace, along the present-day Franklin-Titus County line. Coming from the south, the ancient Indian route first used by Caddo Indians traveling between villages on the Angelina and the Red River crossed Big Cypress Creek into Titus County at Fort Sherman, then continued northward to Indian settlements in Arkansas and Oklahoma. Near Mt. Vernon, which also wasn't there then, Judge Hooker could have turned west on the Choctaw Trail, another trading route for East Texas Indians.
Pause there, stand in place, then leap up the trail of time.
For those suffering covered wagon fatigue in the study of history and lore, welcome to 1919, the year Model A's, Kaisers and Buicks came chugging into Mt. Vernon on the new Bankhead Highway, one of America's earliest transcontinental routes.
Named for Alabama Senator John Hollis Bankhead, from Mt. Vernon the highway continued east through Winfield, Farmers Academy, Mt. Pleasant and Cookville, then on to Texarkana, and up through Little Rock (the route of the Old Military Road).
Running from San Diego to Washington, D.C., the route that split through the Geezerplex gave rise to early road-side motor courts that replaced the wagon yards.
Different from today's road-side motels, early motor courts were small cabins, often with an attached garage.
There were two in Mt. Vernon, now gone.
The motor courts, I mean. Not Mt. Vernon.
Gone too is Mt. Pleasant's El Moro Motor Courts, which had a swimming pool.
"It had a gravel bottom," remembers Arneil McBeth.
"They found a dead lady in that pool," remembers Billy Craig. "Somebody cut her head off."
You can still see the pool, just west of the old refinery, on the south side of what's now Farm to Market 899.
Described in a 1922 tourist guide as "the principal transcontinental artery for motor traffic across the United States," in the 1930's it was designated as U.S. Highway 1. Coming into Mt. Pleasant, the highway passed on the south side of the courthouse lawn, took a dogleg north up Jefferson, then turned back east at 14th Street, bending north to merge with the present route of U.S. 67 east of town.
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In 1937, Depression-era public works programs further honed the route - taking a dogleg out of the highway, the new route bi-passed Farmers Academy and skipped the trip past Titus County's courthouse, shooting straight by the north end of town, where for the next 30 years Gaddis Motor Courts, with its olympic-size pool, was the town's premier overnight stop.
That changed with the opening of I-30 in 1966, coming west from Dallas to Mt. Pleasant, where traffic was funneled off the super slab at the town's new Holiday Inn.
For Franklin County Historical Association docents at The Bankhead Highway Visitors Center, such details are the underside of the story of how the Geezerplex came to be as it is -- the result of centuries travel through and to their back yard.
"In the earliest era of Anglo migration, settlement patterns developed the way modern trade and commerce continue to develop," they say.
Two hundred years ago, strand a man on a riverbank and you get a ferry. Put an exit on an interstate today, you get a franchise restaurant.
Gathering a history class on the lawn of the Bankhead Highway Visitors Center, docents leap astride the faithful mount of a Frenchman named Pegas, "probably a spy whose interest would have been France's claim to the New World. "His diary from 1767 describes a forest road coming up from the south and tells about the Indians living on parched corn through the winter."
He was, maintain the docents, describing an early Caddo route through East Texas, now called the Cherokee Trace.
From both the Caddo and Cherokee trade routes, other trails fanned out.
"Think of a spider's web with a center at the east-west and north-south junction of two ancient Indian roads intersecting just east of Mt. Vernon," invites Franklin County Attorney B.F. Hicks, who parlayed the "re-discovery" of the Bankhead Highway into a grant application securing just shy of a quarter million dollars for development of the visitor's center and Dupree Nature Trail trail in Franklin County. Not that it matters, but in doing so he borrowed Colonel Henry Thuston, whose final home is now the center's feature attraction, from the pages of Titus County's history, perhaps by default. Franklin County had yet to be carved out of Titus County when the Colonel lived there.
For Judge Hooker, the roads leading here led away, to the yet wilder world on the banks of the Sabine, closer to the edge of the Texas frontier in the 1840's.
At the end of the only summer the family spent on Red River County's Blossom Prairie, his wife Elizabeth gave birth to their seventh child. The eighth and ninth children were born in what's Hunt County now, at Hooker's Mill on Hooker's Ridge, which isn't there now.
Hooker's Mill, I mean. Not the ridge.
The site of the mill, say Hunt County historians, now lies beneath the waters of Lake Tawakoni.
As for one of the first - and one of the few - steam grist mills in Northeast Texas, on the day Judge Hooker died, he wrote a will in which one clause notes the sale of the mill to Charles Featherton.
That was December, 1865, the year of the end of the Civil War. Four years earlier, he'd been Hunt County's delegate to the Secession Convention. When war broke out, Hooker's Lone Oak Company was the first raised in Hunt County. Three sons and two sons-in-law served in the Confederacy.
Three years after he settled on the Sabine, land records show that he appeared before the Republic of Texas Land Board's Commissioners of Red River County and was given title to 640 acres along the river. In 1846 he served on the first commissioner's court of newly-formed Hunt County. In 1848, the state map showed "Hooker's" as a community on the road from Clarksville to Buffalo.
From 1851-53, Judge Hooker rode horseback to Austin, a member of the fourth Texas legislature.