Cooks Point
Cooks Point, Burleson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Founded about 1840 where colonial road from southeast crossed San Antonio Road. Settler Gabriel Jackson had two-story log cabin-trading post here. Community was named for Silas L. Cooke, who surveyed much land in this vicinity. It is now a thriving rural village. (1969)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Cooks Point took root about 1840 where a colonial road from the southeast met the old San Antonio Road, a natural crossroads in the earliest years of the Republic of Texas. Settler Gabriel Jackson kept a two-story log cabin trading post here, and the community took its name from surveyor Silas L. Cooke, who mapped much of the surrounding land. It endures today as a rural village.
Why it matters
Crossroads trading posts like this were the seeds of settlement in early Texas, growing where old roads and new surveys met.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Gabriel Jackson
- · Silas L. Cooke
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Burleson County
Caldwell, TX
Burleson County sits in the rich Brazos River basin, settled as early as 1825 along El Camino Real, the old King's Highway. Here in 1830 Mexico built the fort of Tenoxtitlan, between Sterling Robertson's colony to the north and Stephen F. Austin's to the south. Surveyor George B. Erath platted Caldwell in 1840 and later authored the 1846 bill creating the county, named for Gen. Edward Burleson — soldier of Texas independence, congressman, and vice president of the Republic. Plantation agriculture gave way after the Civil War, and railroads arrived in the 1880s.
City of Caldwell
Caldwell, TX
Laid out in 1840 by surveyor George B. Erath on the Old San Antonio Road, Caldwell was named for Mathew 'Old Paint' Caldwell, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. The site had already drawn San Jacinto veteran Lewis L. Chiles, who ran a nearby trading post. When Burleson County formed in 1846 the town became its permanent seat, and rail lines in 1890 and 1912 made it a major agricultural shipping center.
El Camino Real
Brazos County, TX
El Camino Real, the 'Royal Road,' ran roughly a thousand miles from Saltillo in Mexico into present-day Louisiana, following ancient Indian and buffalo trails. Its oldest marked segment was blazed in 1691 under Domingo Terán de los Ríos to link the provincial capital with the Spanish missions of East Texas, and in 1820 Moses Austin traveled it to San Antonio to request the land grant that opened Texas to Anglo-American settlement. In 1918 the state and the Daughters of the American Revolution set granite markers every five miles along the Texas route.
Town of Chriesman
Caldwell, TX
Originally called Yellow Prairie and settled by Alexander Thomson, Jr. — an early Texas patriot and partner of colonizer Sterling C. Robertson — this community relocated to the railroad tracks when the line came through in 1880. It was renamed in 1884 for Capt. H.C. Chriesman, a surveyor for Stephen F. Austin. Today it serves the surrounding ranches.