The History of Jefferson, Texas

Jefferson was founded in the early 1840s, when Allen Urquhart laid out the town along Big Cypress Bayou while Daniel Alley laid out an adjoining addition. The town was named for Thomas Jefferson, and its fortunes were tied to the water from the start. Steamboats could reach Jefferson because of the Great Raft — an enormous natural logjam on the Red River that backed water up the bayou and made the town the westernmost navigable port in the region.

The first steamboat, the Llama, reached Jefferson in late 1843 or early 1844, and from there the town boomed. Cotton, hides, and goods moved by paddlewheel between Jefferson, New Orleans, and St. Louis. By 1870 Jefferson was the largest inland riverport in Texas and second only to Galveston in volume of trade, with a peak population reported around 7,300 in 1872.

At its height after the Civil War, Jefferson was one of the most important commercial centers in Texas — a place of warehouses, hotels, foundries, and a busy turning basin where steamboats spun around for the trip back downriver. The town was a place of firsts: it is credited with the first artificial gas plant in Texas, lighting its streets and buildings with manufactured gas in 1867, and one of the earliest commercial ice-manufacturing operations in the state in 1868.

The wealth of those years is written into Jefferson's surviving architecture — the brick storefronts, the wrought-iron galleries, and the grand homes built by merchants and steamboat money. The Excelsior House hotel, welcoming guests since the 1850s, hosted presidents and dignitaries over the years and still operates today, a direct link to the riverport era.

Jefferson's prosperity rested on the Great Raft, and in November 1873 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers used nitroglycerin to blast the logjam apart. Water levels on the bayou dropped, navigation grew unreliable, and as railroads pushed across Texas they favored rivals like Marshall and Dallas. After the mid-1870s the town declined steadily. Legend blames railroad magnate Jay Gould, said to have cursed Jefferson in the Excelsior House register — a colorful tale that historians consider a myth, since the real cause was the loss of the river and the rise of the rails.

What looked like ruin became Jefferson's salvation. Frozen in time, the town never paved over its 19th-century core. A large historic district was placed on the National Register in 1971, and through its spring Historic Pilgrimage and its reenactment of the Diamond Bessie murder trial — the 1877 killing came to trial in 1878 and has been reenacted every spring since 1955 — Jefferson reinvented itself around its past. Today it thrives on heritage tourism, bed-and-breakfasts, and a reputation as one of the most haunted towns in Texas.