Antebellum Jefferson, Texas: Everyday Life in an East Texas Town

Introduction

1 Jefferson is located in Marion County in northeast Texas about 20 miles north of Marshall, 150 miles east of Dallas, and 40 miles west of Shreveport, Louisiana. It is a small town, but well known for the quality of its historic resources, its bed-and-breakfast operations, and its antique stores; and it is achieving increasing prominence as an educational center. The town is situated on a cypress-fringed bayou called Big Cypress , which enters Caddo Lake, through which the boundary between Texas and Louisiana runs. During the 1800s, Caddo Lake was connected with Soda Lake (now extinct), which was drained by Twelvemile Bayou. The latter bayou (which is still in existence in a modified form) entered the Red River slightly above Shreveport. The Red River emptied into the Mississippi River, which passes by New Orleans shortly before entering the Gulf of Mexico (Fig. 1). During much of the 1800s, New Orleans was the center of trade for the Mississippi Valley, bringing in merchandise from the East Coast and Europe and carrying out the produce of the valley (primarily cotton ) to the East Coast and Europe. It was this water connection with New Orleans that enabled the emergence of a number of ports and landings west of Shreveport that carried out cotton and carried in supplies to their respective market areas. The waterborne commerce of this system of ports and landings was conducted by steamboats. The application of steam to water transIntroDuction 2 Antebellum Jefferson, Texas port was second in importance to the invention of the cotton gin in the spread of cotton agriculture in the antebellum South. Cotton production was useless without the ability to transport to market. Overland transport by ox-wagons was slow and costly; waterborne transport by flatboats and keelboats was inefficient; and the antebellum South did not have a well-developed rail system in its lower and western components . Shallow-draft steamboats penetrated every navigable waterbody , carrying out cotton from within 150 miles, beyond which the cost of overland transport made cotton production unremunerative. Jefferson, which came into existence in 1845, was the most important of the ports and landings on the navigation route west of Shreveport , which was called the Cypress Bayou and the lakes route. It was Fig. 1. Study Area 3 Introduction the most important because it was the port farthest upstream on Cypress Bayou, which enabled it to command a large market area extending from the Indian Territory on the north to Dallas on the west. This was not fortuitous, but rather the primary reason for the selection of the town’s location. This market area and its attendant cotton production expanded rapidly through immigration, enabling Jefferson to prosper. From the 1840s to the 1870s, hundreds of steamboats made thousands of trips to Jefferson, carrying out cotton and animal products (primarily hides and pickled beef in barrels) and carrying in merchandise for the plantations, farms, and towns of its market area. Jefferson was an import and export center, serving as the transfer point between interior ox-wagon transport and exterior steamboat transport. Simple transfer would not have produced a town of importance. Import and export items needed to be stored and serviced, which gave rise to receiving , forwarding, and commission merchants who dominated the landing area. Sales to interior merchants and planters were carried out by large wholesaling houses. These two distinctive business types established Jefferson as an important mercantile center. Jefferson’s importance is illustrated by the following facts: 1. Jefferson ranked fourteenth in population (988) among Texas towns in 1860 and sixth in population (4,190) among Texas towns in 1870, exceeded only by Galveston (13,818), San Antonio (12,256), Houston (9,382), Brownsville (4,905), and Austin (4,428). 2. Jefferson was among the top three ports in Texas in terms of number of boat landings. Galveston was a much larger port. A comparison cannot be made to Houston because of an absence of comparative data. 3. Jefferson may have been the largest steamboat port in Texas, reaching a high point in 1870 when 53 boats made 295 trips to Jefferson . Comparative data are not available. Galveston was serviced by a large fleet of seagoing steamships and sailing vessels, but also by steamboats that ran in the coastal trade and upstream to Houston. The establishment of a rail line between Houston and Galveston prior to the Civil War reduced the number of steamboats that...