Bucksnort

Bucksnort, originally Jarrett Menefee's Supply Station, was located on a 320-acre prairie owned by Thomas J. Chambers in what is now east central Falls County. The settlement, about five miles northeast of the falls on the Brazos River below the rebuilt Fort Milam, which provided protection for the settlers, was bounded on the west by a bayou that flowed into Musselrun Creek and on to the Brazos River. When John and Mary Menefee Marlin and James and Nancy Taylor Marlin returned with their families to their land near the Falls of the Brazos in 1837 after the Runaway Scrape, they found some of their Menefee relatives at the Angelina River. The families of the brothers Laban and Jarrett Menefee accompanied the Marlins and others to the east side of the river, where they formed a little settlement, later called Bucksnort. John Marlin's fort-like home lay three miles south and Dr. Allensworth Adams's home a mile directly north. Supplies were freighted from lower settlements, and the community grew until it had enough children to form a school.

The name Bucksnort, said to have been suggested by an inebriated customer of the saloon, was first recorded in 1844 by William Howe of Ellis County: "Bucksnort is the only supply station between Nashville and Dallas where a man can go to buy food and supplies." When Robertson County was organized in 1838, elections ordered by the county court were held at or near Jarrett Menefee's place. In January 1842 Menefee was one of three men appointed by the Robertson County Commissioners Court to consider a road from Franklin to a place near the falls, or to Menefee's place, and in October of that year five men were ordered to study the route and lay out the road. In 1843 Capt. J. B. Smith recruited a company of eighty men from the surrounding country who eventually joined John Coffee Hays's Texas Rangers and served in the Mexican War.