The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 47, July 1943 - April, 1944 Page: 217
456 p. : ill., maps ; 24 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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The National Road of the Republic of Texas
a military highway from there to Fort Smith and Fort Gibson
had become a necessity. Obviously, this out-of-the-way place
at the end of the National Road was once well furnished with
facilities for both land and water transportation.
As another answer to the reason for a road to the place where
now the village of Kiomatia overlooks Red River, a survey of
North Texas population of one hundred years ago is also re-
vealing. Old Jonesboro-perhaps the first purely Anglo-Amer-
ican town on Texas soil-was only six miles down the river;
Clarksville, that had already begun to supersede it, was some
twenty-five miles to the southeast. The country-side was on the
whole well settled, and schools and other requirements of or-
ganized society were beginning to appear. Population thinned
out to an edge a little more than one hundred miles to the west,
but Red River County had become the established center of
North Texas."
But full justification for the route of the National Road
can hardly be established until one understands more clearly
the early transportation routes accessible to North Texans,
and the way in which those routes fitted into the geog-
raphy of the Southwest. Besides the military road facili-
ties available to Fort Towson, other roads connected the Clarks-
ville-Jonesboro area with the settlements of Arkansas. One of
these was not very different from the path of the Clarksville-
Texarkana road in use today.36 But all of these facilities for
travel and transportation ran northward or eastward, making
the citizens of North Texas in reality a part of the economy of
the United States.
To the south, however, in their means of communication and
exchange with their fellow Texans the North Texans were far
less fortunate. The first settlers of Jonesboro had no southward
travel facilities except by a few Indian trails and a dim path
known to them as the Spanish Trace." An old trail from Jones-
1The counties of Collin, Dallas, Grayson and Hunt were created and
organized in 1846 (Texas Almanac 1939-40, 400, 404, 416 and 425). There
were no county seat towns in Texas west of the present limits of Fannin
County in 1844. Grayson County had a population of about 500 when or-
ganized in 1846. (Mattie Davis Lucas and Mita Holsapple Hall, A History
of Grayson County, Texas.)
3GGreer County Record, 1339.
37A. W. Neville, The History of Lamar County, 12. The Spanish Trace,
evidently a military trail by which the Spaniards reached Red River, was
within present Red River County, about three or four miles from its west
boundary. Vial, in 1788, found a dim trail that entered the "Nacitoches
Forest." Possibly it was identical with the Spanish Trace (Greer County
Record, 908-13).217
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 47, July 1943 - April, 1944, periodical, 1944; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth146054/m1/248/: accessed April 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.