Cherokee County Texas map
31.84° N · 95.16° W · County seat: Rusk · 1,062 sq mi
Cherokee County has two towns of consequence and 25 miles of narrow state-owned railroad running between one of them and the next county. Rusk is the seat and the older place; Jacksonville, 14 miles north on US-69, is nearly three times its size and made its money first on baskets and then on tomatoes. The county keeps the name of the people who farmed this stretch of the Neches valley until they were driven out of Texas in 1839.
Rusk is at the centre on US-69 and US-84; Jacksonville is north on US-69 and US-79. The Neches River runs down the western boundary and SH-21 crosses the southeast corner at Alto.
Where Cherokee County is
Cut from Nacogdoches County in July 1846, the county runs roughly 40 miles north to south between the Neches and the Angelina drainages. Clockwise from the north its neighbours are Smith County, Rusk County on the northeast and east, Nacogdoches County east and southeast, Angelina County southeast, Houston County southwest, Anderson County west across the Neches and Henderson County northwest.
Jacksonville is 36 miles south of Tyler on US-69, and Rusk is about 34 miles northwest of Nacogdoches and 43 miles northwest of Lufkin on US-69. The county has almost no standing water — 9 of its 1,062 square miles — which is unusual for East Texas and is why it has no reservoir town.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | Population in county (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Jacksonville | City | 14,020 |
| Rusk (county seat) | City | 5,393 |
| Alto | Town | 1,027 |
| Wells | Town | 855 |
| New Summerfield | City | 836 |
| Gallatin | City | 321 |
| Bullard (part) | Town | 254 |
| Reklaw (part) | City | 178 |
| Cuney | Town | 113 |
| Troup (part) | City | 51 |
Four places straddle a county line. Bullard and Troup are mostly in Smith County, Reklaw mostly in Rusk County — its name is Walker spelled backwards, after the landowner. New Summerfield, north of Jacksonville, is the centre of the county's nursery trade.
Roads
- US-69 – the north–south spine, from Bullard through Jacksonville and Rusk and on southeast toward Wells and Lufkin.
- US-79 – enters from Palestine in the west, runs through Jacksonville and leaves northeast toward Henderson.
- US-84 – crosses at Rusk, west toward Palestine and east toward Mount Enterprise and Carthage.
- US-175 – clips the northwest corner between Athens and Jacksonville.
- SH-21 – the old El Camino Real route, through Alto in the southeast toward Crockett one way and Nacogdoches the other.
- SH-110, SH-135, SH-204 and SH-294 – the farm-town connectors linking Rusk, Troup, New Summerfield and the Neches bottom.
The Texas State Railroad
The Texas State Railroad was begun in 1881 by convict labour from the Rusk Penitentiary to haul iron ore and wood to the prison's ironworks, and it was extended westward until it reached Palestine in Anderson County. That makes it a state-owned line built by the prison system rather than by a railroad company, which is why the state still owns the right of way. The prison closed as a penitentiary and became Rusk State Hospital; the track became an excursion railroad, and steam and diesel trains now run the 25 miles between the Victorian-style depots at Rusk and Palestine, crossing about two dozen bridges over the creek bottoms in between.
Rusk has a second oddity of engineering: a footbridge across a boggy creek near the square, first built in the 1860s so that people could reach the courthouse in wet weather, and long claimed as the longest footbridge in the country.
Tomatoes, baskets and the Caddo mounds
Jacksonville's first industry was making veneer baskets and crates by the million for shipping produce, and the produce that filled them was tomatoes: the deep sandy soil around Jacksonville and Troup supported a tomato district that shipped by rail across the country in the first half of the twentieth century, and the town still runs a Tomato Fest in June. Commercial tomato acreage has fallen away, and much of the same ground now grows nursery stock and ornamental plants instead.
Six miles southwest of Alto on SH-21, the Caddo Mounds State Historic Site preserves three earthen mounds — two for temples, one for burials — raised by a Caddo community that lived there from about AD 800. It is the westernmost known ceremonial centre of the mound-building Caddo culture, and it sits on the same route the Spanish later used as El Camino Real de los Tejas.