Cherokee Trace

Upshur's own history on this road starts with settlers. The Handbook of Texas says Isaac Moody, believed to be the first settler in the county, built on the Cherokee Trace near West Mountain in 1836, and that the Trace and the Jefferson-Dallas Road made the area a junction of two early immigration routes. A 1946 county history says William H. Hart put up a log house on the Trace about a mile north of Gilmer in 1843, and that the road once wound down to a spring in what it calls Roosevelt Park, an old camping ground.

What the plaque says

Cherokee Trace Near this site the Cherokee Indians blazed an early Texas trail. They wanted a road from their settlements near Nacogdoches to their home reservation on the White River in Arkansas. About 1821 they selected a man known for his uncanny sense of direction. Mounting a horse and dragging buffalo skins behind him, he set a northward course. A group of Indians followed, blazing the trees to mark the trail. Another group cleared away the heavy underbrush and trees. A third group established camping grounds by springs and planted Cherokee roses which still mark the route today. Sam Houston, friend of the Cherokee, travelled it on his first Texas visit. David Crockett and other Texas revolution fighters as well as thousands of settlers from northeastern United States first saw Texas from the road, many establishing homes nearby. The Cherokee remained peaceful as long as friend Sam Houston was President of the Republic. In June 1839 they were ordered from Texas because of raids and intrigues with Mexican agents. A two-day battle ensued on the Neches River where their chief was killed. The tribe retreated, fighting, leaving Texas by the famous trail they made.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Bob Sandlin State Park — 24 mi
  A 1987 state park on a 9,000-acre reservoir, where a Republic of Texas stockade called Fort Sherman stood in 1838 and the Caddo lived from A.D. 800 to 1860, now with fishing piers, trails and cabins.
• Daingerfield State Park — 25 mi
  A pine-and-hardwood park built in 1935-39 by a white and a Black Civilian Conservation Corps company, with a dammed lake, Bass Lodge and a 2.4-mile loop trail around the water.
• East Texas Oil Museum — 25 mi
  A Kilgore College museum that rebuilds the 1930s oil boom in a full-scale Boomtown with a general store, drugstore and newspaper office, plus dioramas, films and antiques given by East Texans.
• Tyler State Park — 26 mi
  A 985-acre park eight miles north of Tyler, built by the Civilian Conservation Corps from 1935 to 1941 around a 64-acre spring-fed lake, with more than 13 miles of trails.

More markers nearby

• Upshur County, C. S. A. — steps away
• The Looney School — steps away
• The Gilmer Mirror — steps away
• First Baptist Church of Gilmer — steps away