Crockett
Crockett, Houston County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Founded 1837. Named for David Crockett, who had visited here on way to the Alamo, 1836. Old fortified log courthouse was often the refuge for settlers during Indian wars. During Civil War had camp of instruction. Telegraph and stagecoach station for South. Forestry, farming and livestock center.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Founded in 1837 and named for David Crockett, who had passed through on his way to the Alamo the year before, Crockett grew into a hub of the young Republic of Texas frontier. Its fortified log courthouse sheltered settlers during conflicts with Native peoples, and by the Civil War the town hosted a camp of instruction. As a telegraph and stagecoach station, it tied the surrounding farming and timber country into the wider South.
Why it matters
Crockett's layered history — Alamo legend, frontier defense, Civil War mobilization, and transportation crossroads — distills the whole arc of nineteenth-century East Texas into a single county seat.
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Related people
- · David Crockett
Related events
- · Battle of the Alamo
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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John T. Smith
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New York-born John Titus Smith came to Texas from Georgia in 1849 and settled on a cotton plantation at McKenzie's Bend on the Trinity River, where he operated the steamboat Ida Reese. He served as chief justice of Houston County in the 1850s and later in the state legislature, and fought in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. He and his wife Elizabeth raised a large family before his death in 1874.
Hall's Bluff
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Marylander Joshua James Hall bought a Trinity River land grant in 1839 and, with his son James Madison Hall, opened a port and ferry that became a shipping point for Houston County's settlers. A community of stores, churches, a post office, and a school grew up around the crossing through the mid-19th century. Unreliable river shipping and the arrival of the railroads in the 1870s drained the port's traffic, and most residents drifted away.
Read's Opening
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This broad prairie was a favored nineteenth-century route to and from the Trinity River before Robert Newton Read and his wife Susan moved here from Arkansas by 1850, giving the landscape its name. The Reads farmed the opening, bought land, ran commercial ventures in Crockett, and donated ground for an African American Presbyterian church east of town. Though the family moved on to Mineola in 1876, Read's Opening remains woven into Houston County's history.