Madison County, Texas: From Native Homelands to Frontier County A History of Early Settlers, Pioneer Families, and the Making of a Central Texas Community

Long before Madison County had a name, the Trinity River carried the Cenis and Bidai peoples, Spanish explorers, and French adventurers through the East Texas timberlands. Then came the settlers: peddlers, doctors, farmers, and families willing to bet everything on cheap land and cotton. Madison County, Texas, follows that story from its first Native homelands to the frontier county that grew up in their place. You'll meet a Spanish town undone by flood and raids, the massacre at Spanish Bluff, and the legend of silver lost along the Old San Antonio Road. You'll join some 200 refugees crowding a single ferry during the Runaway Scrape, and watch a courthouse burn again and again, taking the county's records with it. You'll walk the streets of a wild-and-wooly county seat with a log jail and a saloon on the square, and follow the families who built Madisonville, Midway, and North Zulch, from a runaway German peddler to a doctor with arrowheads buried in his cabin walls. Drawing on pioneer memoirs, old maps, deeds, and local tradition, this book preserves the voices of a county that almost lost its own history. It is a must-read for lovers of Texas history, genealogists tracing East Texas roots, and anyone curious about how a frontier community came to be.