The Republic
The news of victory soon restored the minds of the people to sanity, and they entered with alacrity into the work of establishing the new government of the Republic. After the disorganization of the West and South, which were devastated by the advance of the enemy. East Texas remained in a position of leadership, and furnished perhaps more than its share of the prominent officials of the Republic. The towns, including Nacogdoches, were alive with the discussions of governmental problems, and the advocacy of the names of the foremost citizens for high offices. After the repression of Mexican domination, politics arose to unprecedented heights, and everybody was affected by political fervor. Among the first officials of the new-formed Republic, Nacogdoches furnished Sam Houston for President, General Thomas J. Rusk as Secretary of War; Colonel John Forbes as Commissary General of the Army.
Following the formation of the new government, the business men of Nacogdoches entered upon a period of expansion, resulting in the laying out of numerous new towns in the then Nacogdoches county, extending almost to the Gulf of Mexico on the south and including Dallas on the north. Among the towns thus formed following the Revolution may be mentioned Pattonia south of Nacogdoches on the Angelina river, and a little further south the town of Travis on the same river, Mount Sterling at the home of John Durst on the Angelina river west of Nacogdoches, and a few miles further up the river where the present highway crosses, the town of Angelina where James Durst and his father, Joe Durst, lived. The original town of Rusk was south of Nacogdoches where the road to Fort Teran crossed the Angelina river on the Pierre Roblo grant. Thornville, near the present village of Mahl; Liberty, a few miles northwest of Douglass; Jackson, built on an island on the Attoyac not far from where Chireno was later founded. Haden Edwards founded two towns north of Nacogdoches on the Sabine river, near the present town of Longview, one of which was named Fredonia, in memory of his ill-fated revolution, and the other he called Cotton-Plant. In addition to these ghost towns of long ago, we may mention such towns as Attoyac, Melrose, Chireno and Douglass, each of which was regularly laid out in lots and blocks, in anticipation of the boom to come.