Cook's Fort

A company under Capt. G. K. Black built the stockade in late 1839 or early 1840 on Joseph Thomas Cook's land, three miles southeast of Rusk, after the Cherokee had been removed. The Cooks came from South Carolina by way of Alabama and Mississippi and were in Nacogdoches by 1834; most of their eleven children lived there. By 1846 the settlement held an estimated 250 people, enslaved people included. The Handbook says the locating commission favored it as county seat, but James Cook objected because a town would interfere with his farming, so Rusk was founded instead.

What the plaque says

Cook's Fort Named in honor of Joseph T. Cook; native of North Carolina; Early settler in Nacogdoches; Owner of land on which a military company under Captain Black built a fort never attacked by Indians; On adjacent land, James Cook built a store and blacksmith shop; About them a village grew up; Population in 1846, 250; After establishment of Rusk, inhabitants moved there.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Caddo Mounds State Historic Site — 11 mi
  Three earthen mounds of an ancestral Caddo village and ceremonial center on the old El Camino Real, settled about A.D. 800 and still sacred to Caddo people, with a grass house and visitor center.
• Texas State Railroad Excursion Train — 26 mi
  A round trip of about 25 miles of track between the Palestine and Rusk depots through the Piney Woods, on a line built by prison labor and reopened as a tourist railroad in 1976.

More markers nearby

• Site of Tassie Belle and Star and Cresent Iron Ore Furnaces — 1.9 mi
• Site of Rusk College — 2.7 mi
• James Stephen Hogg and Cherokee County — 2.8 mi
• Rusk Footbridge — 3.1 mi