So What's the Story Behind East Texas, Anyway?

Long before Texas had borders or oil wells, Caddo peoples lived across East Texas in farming communities with hierarchical societies and wide trade networks. The best place to see what they left behind is Caddo Mounds State Historic Site, run by the Texas Historical Commission. It sits on State Highway 21 about six miles southwest of Alto, in southern Cherokee County. The commission says ancestral Caddo built a village and ceremonial center there more than 1,200 years ago, and three earthen mounds still stand. According to the Handbook of Texas, early Caddos settled the site around A.D. 850–900. They grew large amounts of corn and traded with peoples as far away as the Gulf Coast, the Ouachita Mountains and the Appalachians. Two of the mounds were communal ceremonial areas and the third was a burial mound for the community's elite. The site served as a regional center for almost 500 years before it was abandoned around A.D. 1300.

The name "Texas" comes from the region too. The Handbook explains that "tejas" (also recorded as "texias", "techas" and other spellings) was widely used by East Texas Indians before the Spanish arrived. It usually meant "friends," and the Hasinai Caddo also used it to mean "allies" or as a greeting.

The first Spanish mission in East Texas, San Francisco de los Tejas, began in May 1690 near the Neches River. In 1716 Spain founded Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de los Nacogdoches Mission in a village of the Nacogdoches Indians. Its abandoned buildings later became the core of the town of Nacogdoches. Epidemics between 1691 and 1816 sharply reduced Caddo populations. In 1859 the remaining Caddos, about 1,050 people, were removed to Indian Territory. The Caddo Nation is still based in western Oklahoma, near Binger.

Texas legally entered the Union on December 29, 1845. Over the next decades, East Texas farms and plantations shaped the region's towns. Henderson, now the Rusk County seat, was laid out in 1843, and a railroad branch completed in 1877 made it a shipping center for farm products. The Texas legislature created both Tyler and Rusk on April 11, 1846, as the county seats of Smith and Cherokee counties. The Handbook of Texas says Tyler quickly became a leading shipping and commercial center for the region. It also notes that by 1860 more than 35 percent of Tyler's population were enslaved people.

Lumber came next. The Handbook reports that the Texas lumber industry hit its all-time state record in 1907, cutting more than 2.25 billion board feet, the third-largest total in the nation. In the 1920s lumbering declined as many companies used up their timber and shut down, leaving most of the virgin pine cut over. Later reforestation, promoted by what became the Texas Forest Service, brought the industry back. By 1940 Texas was again cutting more than a billion board feet a year.

The Texas State Railroad has a different origin than you might expect. According to the Handbook, it started in 1896 as an industrial line for the state prison's iron foundry near Rusk. It was extended to Maydelle and then to Palestine, opening in 1909, largely with convict labor. Today it runs vintage steam and diesel trains on a 50-mile round trip between Rusk and Palestine.

In 1927 Columbus Marion "Dad" Joiner, a 67-year-old promoter from Ardmore, Oklahoma, took mineral leases in Rusk County. He paid for drilling by selling shares in syndicates. His first two wells on Daisy Bradford's land failed. The third, the Daisy Bradford No. 3, about eight miles west of Henderson, struck oil in September 1930 and was completed on October 3, 1930. The Handbook of Texas calls the result the largest oilfield in the world up to that time. It also describes the East Texas oilfield as the largest and most prolific oil reservoir in the contiguous United States. The field spans parts of Gregg, Rusk, Upshur, Smith and Cherokee counties and covers about 140,000 acres. More than 30,000 wells have produced nearly 5.2 billion barrels.

Kilgore changed fastest. The Handbook says the town had fallen below 500 residents by mid-1930, then grew to 12,000 by 1936. At the boom's peak, Kilgore had more than 1,100 producing wells inside the city limits. Part of one downtown block held the greatest concentration of oil derricks in the world, known as the "World's Richest Acre." Overproduction crashed oil prices, and in August 1931 Governor Ross Sterling declared martial law to control output. The East Texas Oil Museum at Kilgore College recreates those years with Boomtown, USA, a full-scale replica of a 1930s oil town.

The oil boom also reshaped nearby towns. Henderson grew from 3,000 people in 1930 to 10,000 in 1933. Many oil companies and field developers opened offices in Tyler, which became a regional center for the oil and gas industry. Tyler grew to more than 25,000 people by 1933 and 28,279 by 1940.

Tyler's rose industry came before oil. When disease and bad weather wiped out the area's peach orchards, nurserymen switched to roses. The first recorded sale of rose plants came in 1879, and the first full train carload shipped in 1917. By 1945, Smith County grew 80 percent of the Texas rose crop, and by the late 1950s nearly 300 growers produced more than 20 million plants a year. Tyler, called the Rose Capital of the World, still holds the Texas Rose Festival every October.

According to the Handbook of Texas, commerce replaced agriculture as Tyler's economic base in the 1950s, and the city became the leading medical and educational center for the area. Today the Texas Department of State Health Services lists UT Health East Texas Tyler Regional Hospital as a Level I trauma center.

Kilgore College started a lasting tradition in 1940, when Gussie Nell Davis founded the Kilgore Rangerettes. The Handbook calls them the first women's precision drill team in the world. In Rusk, the Texas State Railroad still runs as a heritage line.