The History of Alto, Texas

Long before any town existed, the Alto area was home to the Caddo people. Around A.D. 800, ancestral Caddo built a village and ceremonial center on the alluvial prairie just southwest of present-day Alto — the site archaeologists call the George C. Davis Site, the southwesternmost ceremonial center of the Caddoan world. They chose it for its sandy loam soil ideal for farming, the abundant food of the surrounding forest, and the springs flowing to the nearby Neches River.

Most of the great earthen mounds were built between about 1100 and 1300, and three of them — still sacred to the Caddo people today — rise from the Piney Woods at what is now Caddo Mounds State Historic Site. The mound center was largely abandoned by around 1300, but the Caddo people remained across the region and were still here when Spanish missionaries arrived in the 1690s.

Centuries later, when Spanish travelers came through on El Camino Real de los Tejas — the royal road connecting Mexico to the missions of East Texas and Louisiana — the old Caddo mound site southwest of Alto lay right along the route.

The Camino Real passed near what are now Crockett, Alto, and Nacogdoches, knitting the region together along one historic route.

The modern town took the name Alto — Spanish for 'high' — a name chosen in 1852 for the town's location on the high ridge between the Angelina and Neches rivers. Alto grew up as a farming community in southern Cherokee County, along the route that became State Highway 21, still tracing the path of the historic Camino Real.

Through the years Alto developed as an agricultural town known for its farming, cattle ranching, and timber. Today it's a small, close-knit community proud of an extraordinary heritage: a place where you can stand on ground walked by the Caddo a thousand years ago and by Spanish travelers three centuries past, all along the same high road.