Jefferson used to be the first city in Texas. Standing on the shore of Big Cypress Bayou, 20 miles from the Louisiana line, busy Jefferson shipped cotton, flour, pork, wool, hides, beeves and beeswax over the then navigable bayou waters to Caddo Lake, thence down the Red River to the Mississippi, New Orleans and the sea. During Reconstruction and after, Jefferson sheltered some 35,000 folk, their bustling business centring around the city's slave-built courthouse and its mile of docks.
In the 1870s, a Cassandra appeared on this happy scene in the person of...
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