Historic Walker County

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Cincinnati town survey.
COURTESY OF THEWALKER COUNTY
HISTORICAL COMMISSION.
In the early 1830s, Pleasant Gray,
an adventurous Anglo explorer from
Huntsville, Alabama, moved to Texas
to take advantage of Mexico’s liberal
empresario system, which granted
hundreds of acres of land to anyone
willing to homestead in Texas. On July
12, 1835, Mexican officials granted
Gray a patent for one league of land a
few miles southwest of the Trinity
River. Gray worked with his wife
Hannah and brother Ephraim to build
a home on his new land, and he
quickly opened trade with the local
Bidai and Alabama-Coushatta Indians.
Soon, he was joined by other Anglo
migrants, including Thomas P. Carson,
who built a blacksmith shop near
Gray’s burgeoning trading post. With
the growth of his settlement, Gray
decided to bestow a name on his new
community, calling it Huntsville in
honor of his former home in Alabama. 8
Following the War for Texas
Independence in 1836, Gray’s settlement
at Huntsville became part of
Washington and later Montgomery
County in the new Republic of Texas.
As the local population grew,
Huntsville took on a life and character
of its own. The Globe Tavern, a frame building
that served as an inn and stage coach shop,
appeared in 1841. Two years later merchant
Alexander McDonald constructed a store and
Masonic lodge. The same community spirit that
inspired the Masons also helped finance the
construction of the area’s first school—the
“Brick Academy”—which provided education to
boys and, later, girls from the surrounding area. 9
As Huntsville residents watched the slow but
steady growth of their community, another
Anglo migrant, James DeWitt, established a
nearby settlement called Cincinnati in 1837.
With its commanding presence on the Trinity
River near a stage road connecting Washingtonon-the-Brazos
and Nacogdoches, Cincinnati
soon became one of the area’s leading
commercial centers. Local farmers transported
cotton and other goods to Cincinnati, and then
steamboats carried the goods down the Trinity
River to the port at Galveston. By the 1850s,
Cincinnati boasted “a saloon, a grocery store, a
cotton warehouse, a dry-goods store, a saddlery,
a tannery, a cotton gin, a blacksmith shop, a
wagon-maker, a stonemason, and two doctors.” 10
Cincinnati’s growth paralleled that in other
parts of Texas, and American leaders in
Washington, D.C., took note. In 1845, the
United States annexed the Republic of Texas,
making it the 28th state to join the Union. Then,
a year later, the Texas legislature established
Walker County as an independent entity with a
county seat in Huntsville. The county was initially
named for Robert J. Walker, a U.S. Senator
from Mississippi who championed recognition
of the Republic of Texas and annexation of the
state. Ironically, Walker’s Unionist sympathies
during the Civil War caused local residents to
request that the Texas Confederate legislature
rename the county in honor of Samuel H.
Walker, a Texas Ranger and Indian fighter who
died at the Battle of Huamantla in 1847. 11
8 ✦ H I S T O R I C W A L K E R C O U N T Y