It is likely that the Spanish first came into the area in 1542, after the death of Hernando De Soto caused the expedition's new leader, Luis de Moscoso Alvarado, to seek an overland route back to Mexico (see map). The first documented appearance of white men in what is now Cherokee County was in the late 1600's. The French of the La Salle expedition probably wandered through  in 1686-87.  Though it was once thought La Salle died in Cherokee County, most historians now place the location of his grave nearer Navasota.  When the Spanish learned that the French explorer La Salle had landed on the Texas coast and was traveling in East Texas they met with the Tejas tribe in order to establish a mission in the area.  In 1690 they built a log mission near Weches, in nearby Houston County.  They christened this first East Texas mission San Francisco de los Tejas. The mission was abandoned in 1693, after disease killed more that 3,000 of the Tejas people and a drought destroyed the corn crop, adding famine to pestilence. The Tejas medicine men blamed the white men for the plague and finally the Spaniards gave up their efforts at converting the natives.  They ignored the area until 1705, when French traders began to do business among the Tejas tribes. To reinforce their claim to the territory, Spanish authorities sent a representative to establish a series of missions and a presidio in East Texas. On July 3, 1716, Capt. Domingo Ramón founded Nuestro Padre San Francisco de los Tejas Mission among the Neches Indians. Fourteen years later the Spanish permanently abandoned the mission, with Spain's claim to be maintained by the mission at Nacogdoches thereafter. 

By 1820 only a few remnants of the original Tejas tribes remained. Those who didn't succumb to  pestilence were killed by immigrant indians settling the area. Little remained except the landmarks named for them: a river that bears the name of the Neche tribe, a county named after the Nacogdoche tribe, and Texas, an Anglicized version of the word Tejas. 

The Cherokee Indians, for whom the county was named, began settling onto Tejas land north of El Camino Real (the Old San Antonio Road) about 1820 and were joined by Delawares, Shawnees, and Kickapoos. The Cherokees were unlike the wilder Indians to the west, because they lived in log cabins, farmed the land and raised livestock. They sold corn to the people of Nacogdoches, owned guns, and were good marksmen. 

Spain allowed the Cherokees to settle in East Texas, intending to use them as a buffer against Anglo-American settlement. Meanwhile, governing of the Texas territory passed from Spain to Mexico. During this time three Cherokee chiefs, Bowles, Fields, and Nicollet, having learned how important it was to hold legal title to their land, were in Mexico City trying to get a permanent land grant from the Mexican government at the same time as Stephen F. Austin. Unfortunately, they lacked the legal expertise and funds to succeed. Anglo-American settlers began moving onto land claimed by the Cherokees near Linwood in the late 1820s. In 1826 two empresarios laid claim to Cherokee lands; David G. Burnet obtained an empresario grant to lands north of El Camino Real, and the area south of the road fell to empresario Joseph Vehlein. In 1798, the first land grant in the county went to Nacogdoches trade merchants William Barr and Peter Samuel Davenport, but they did not settle there and the land was not patented until 1832, when John Durst did so. (Durst later lost some of his land in a lawsuit to Robert Mitchell, who established the settlement of Alto on the property he won in the suit.) The first land grant to be patented was four leagues in 1828 by Helena Kimble Dill, widow of Capt. James Dill. She divided three leagues among her three daughters, one of whom was Helena, who later established the Forest Hill Plantation with her husband, Captain Henry Berryman. 

The steady increase of settlers made the Cherokees increasingly nervous, but the Mexican government shut down the territory to Anglo settlement in 1830 and kept the tribe loyal by dangling the prospect of a title to their land just out of their reach. When war broke out between Texas and Mexico in 1835, the Cherokees were caught in the middle and chose to declare themselves neutral in the conflict. 

(photo:  Sam Houston) The Texas revolutionary government sent Sam Houston, an adopted member of the Cherokee tribe, to make sure the Cherokees didn't side with the Mexican government. Houston recommended that the Cherokees be granted title to the lands north of El Camino Real and the Neches River and west of the Angelina and Sabine River. Houston negotiated a treaty with the Cherokees, establishing a reservation that encompassed Smith and Cherokee Counties and parts of Van Zandt, Rusk and Gregg counties. Eight Cherokee leaders signed the treaty in 1836, but the Texas legislature later refused to ratify it. As the first president of the Texas Republic, Sam Houston worked hard to maintain good relations with the Cherokees, but a militant faction of the tribe remained pro-Mexican. In 1838, an increasing influx of Anglo-Americans onto Cherokee lands led to attacks on settlers in the Cherokee County area. One attack resulted in the Killough Massacre, which took place on October 5, 1838 on the Killough farm northwest of Jacksonville. These attacks were blamed on a Mexican-Cherokee force, although the Cherokees denied having anything to do with it. When Houston left office, his successor, Mirabeau B. Lamar, wanted all indians expelled from Texas. He sent troops, triggering the Cherokee War that took place in the summer of 1839 in Cherokee, Smith and surrounding counties, and which ended with the death of Chief Bowles and the expulsion of the Cherokee tribe. 

Like the Tejas before them, the Cherokee legacy is reflected in the county's name and other landmarks. The names of individual Cherokees are echoed in the names of the creeks crisscrossing the countryside where they once lived; names like Keys, Tails, Bowles, Little Bean, One-Army, One-Eye, and Striker Creek. The area known as Striker Town, west of Lake Striker, began life as a Cherokee village. 

After the Cherokees and other tribes were driven from their homes, white settlers quickly occupied the abandoned Indian farms and the communities of Pine Town, Lockranzie, Linwood, and Cook's Fort developed. By 1846 the population in the area had increased enough to warrant creation of another county and Cherokee County was marked off from Nacogdoches County. The state legislature enacted a law creating the county on April 11, 1846, and it was organized by election on July 13 of that year. The same act specified that a county seat should be established within three miles of the geographic center of the new county, so the town of Rusk was established as the county seat.  Ironically, the new town named in honor of Thomas J. Rusk was situated in the middle of an Indian cornfield.  Only one white man lived at Rusk then; John Kilgore, who lived in an Indian "shanty" near the site of the old John H. Bonner home. 

The county's settlers were mostly from the South and brought with them the economic and social traditions of that region. The 1850 population of 6,673 was the third largest in the state. By 1860 the population had nearly doubled to 12,098, of whom nearly a quarter, or 3,250 were slaves. Of the white families, 29 percent owned slaves, although only thirty-two plantations had twenty or more slaves; seven slaveholders in the county owned more than forty slaves. 

In addition to Rusk, several new towns appeared shortly after the organization of the county. Larissa, founded in 1846 in the northwest part of the county, became the largest town. Gum Creek, soon renamed Jacksonville, was founded in 1847. Alto was established on the Old San Antonio Road in 1851. Lone Star (originally Skin Tight), Knoxville, and Griffin were other pioneer communities. 

In 1861, when the Civil War began, the county voters strongly supported secession. Twenty-four companies from the county, made up of over 2000 volunteers, entered Confederate service. When Abraham Lincoln was elected in November, an observer noted on election day that "the Lone Star flag floated over the courthouse and Abraham Lincoln, in effigy, was hanging from the limb of a sweet gum in the northwest corner of the courtyard." The Confederate Army maintained two training camps, a prisoner of war camp, a large commissary depot, and conscription and field-transportation offices in the county. War demands allowed the development of two iron foundries and a gun factory. A monument commemorating Confederate War Veterans was erected in 1907. 

Educational institutions began to develop in Cherokee County soon after white settlement in the area. There was a secondary academy by 1848, and in 1850 Cherokee County had seventeen public schools and ranked first in the state in the number of school children attending (537 males, 446 females). In 1854 the county commissioners established forty-four school districts. Higher education was available as early as 1855 at Hale Institute in Rusk, but the most important institution of higher education was Larissa College, which opened in 1856. Lon Morris College began as the Alexander Collegiate Institute in 1894 in Jacksonville. Jacksonville Baptist College was founded by the East Texas Educational Society and received its state charter on June 26, 1899.  After the turn of the century, improved transportation led to the consolidation of the rural schools, leaving the county with six independent school districts wholly in the county. 

The lumber industry was one of the county's first industries, supplied by a seemingly inexhaustible supply of virgin pine and hardwood timber. The first sawmill was built by John Durst at the lower San Antonio Road crossing of the Angelina in 1832.  Cut timber was hauled on trails through the woods by horse, mule or ox-drawn wagons.  Since they had to be located near timber stands, early mills were isolated.   As a result, several small mill towns sprung up and then later disappeared. These towns were owned and operated by the lumber companies and populated by their employees. Many small sawmill communities sprang up in the county, but one stood out from the rest--Wildhurst, established around 1900 and operated by Chronister Lumber. Other towns that owed their existence to sawmill operations were Chronister, Kilraven (also known as Spink's Switch, Spinks Mill, and Morton), Reese, and Meshaw. 

In the late 1800's and early 1900's, the iron ore industry, the lumber industry and the arrival of the railroads drastically altered the settlement pattern. All the old towns except Jacksonville, Rusk, and Alto disappeared, unable to compete with the new railroad centers. Troup was born when the International-Great Northern (later called the Missouri Pacific) was built in 1872.  The same railroad breathed new life into Jacksonville. Between 1882 and 1885 the Kansas and Gulf Short Line (later called the Cotton-Belt) brought rail service to Rusk and Alto and produced new towns: Bullard, Mount Selman, Craft, Dialville, Forest, and Wells.  The state began construction on the Texas State Railroad in 1893.  In 1905 the Texas and New Orleans Railroad produced Cuney, Reese, Turney, Gallatin, Ponta, and Reklaw. In 1906, prison crews extended the Texas State Railroad line to Maydelle and by 1909 it had reached Palestine.  The only new town that did not owe its existence to a railroad was New Summerfield, which was founded as a market center in the late 1890s. 

In the late 1870's, the Texas Legislature bought 250 acres for the East Branch Penitentiary at Rusk and several thousand acres of timber to be made into charcoal to fire the state foundries.  Construction of the  penitentiary, the state's second enclosed prison, was begun in 1877.  In order to take advantage of the county's rich iron ore deposits, "Old Alcalde," the first convict-operated iron ore blast furnace began operation  in 1884 at the prison.  At first, charcoal for Old Alcalde was obtained from nearby forests, but the supply was soon depleted and foundry operators had to go farther afield.  The State Prison System began construction of the Texas State Railroad in 1893, using convicts who were paid fifty cents a day to work from sunrise to sundown.  The line was used to transport  iron ore and charcoal to the prison-operated iron furnace.  A railroad line to Wells was also built by convict labor and was used to transport charcoal manufactured at the prison-operated coaling camp near Wells.  An estimated 3,000 of the state's "more troublesome" prisoners were housed at the Wells camp.  They cut and burned the hardwood used to make charcoal and loaded it on the train.  Today the sound of axes no longer ring through the woods, but the county road that runs near the site of the camp is still known to local residents as "The Chopping Road." 

The iron furnace was not the only convict-run industry during this time.  The prison also operated a sawmill and a furniture factory, which was destroyed by fire in 1911.  After the death of New Birmingham, the iron industry died out and in 1913 the iron furnace at the prison was dismantled. In 1919 the prison was converted into the East Texas Hospital for the Insane, later Rusk State Hospital, a state-run mental hospital. 

The twentieth century brought many technological improvements to the county. The first automobile arrived in 1905; by the 1920's automobile ownership was commonplace. During the 1930's and 1940's, due largely to WPA and CCC projects, the basic highway system in the county was paved and a new courthouse built.  The first airport in the county was established at Jacksonville in 1934. In the 1940's the Rural Electrification Administration made electricity possible for rural homes. 

With the onset of the Depression, farming in the county declined. Cotton had replaced wheat as the major crop immediately after the Civil War, but production fell due to New Deal regulations. The tomato industry became important to the county and grew rapidly after its beginnings at Craft in 1897 until its collapse in the 1950's. Since then, Cherokee County agriculture has centered on cattle and timber. The nursery industry dates from the 1880s and is of increasing importance in the New Summerfield-Reklaw area. Some truck farming still exists, and dairies remain significant. The typical Cherokee County farm of today is a beef-and-timber operation run as a sideline by a landowner with a job in town. 

Since World War II, industry has led the private sector of the economy, with Jacksonville the industrial and commercial hub of the county. Tourism is of growing importance, spurred by the establishment in 1971 of the Texas State Railroad State Historical Park, used as a site for the filming of several motion pictures. 

The last passenger train ran in the late 1960s, and in the early 1980s the Southern Pacific and the Cotton Belt stopped all service south of Rusk, signaling the end of an era. 

The advent of the automobile and school consolidations led to the growth of the four major towns (Jacksonville, Rusk, Alto, and Wells) at the expense of the others, many of which have ceased to exist. Only a few scattered historical markers, cemeteries, or a lone country store still bear testimony to the existence of these once thriving communities. 

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Block, W. T. East Texas Mill Towns and Ghost Towns. Lufkin, TX:
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     1935-1945. [Online].  LC #fsa 8a27374. 
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