Fort Boggy State Park

Fort Boggy State Park covers 1,847 acres in Leon County. Eileen Crain Sullivan gave the land to Texas Parks and Wildlife in 1985, and the park opened in 2001. It has about 3.5 miles of trails, the 15-acre Sullivan Lake for paddling and fishing, cabins and primitive hike-in campsites. Reservations are advised because the park often fills.

The name comes from a settler stockade of 1840. Families from Tennessee, among them the Byrns and Staleys, founded the first settlement north of the Old San Antonio Road, and Mississippi families such as the Erwins followed. Parks and Wildlife says the Keechi had a village about three miles north of present-day Centerville and the Kickapoo lived along the Trinity. It says Native Americans killed C. C. Staley in February 1840, and the settlers then built a log palisade 75 yards square with two blockhouses and 11 dwellings. It sheltered 75 people by the end of the year.

Republic of Texas President Mirabeau B. Lamar authorized a Ranger company under Capt. Thomas Greer, who was killed in 1841 while scouting Keechi Creek. Sickness drove the Byrns and Erwin families out, attacks declined and the fort fell into disrepair. White and African American families then farmed the land for nearly a century, until the Sullivans stopped cultivation in the 1930s. The ground along Boggy Creek has largely regained its natural look. The park is open daily, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.