Fredonia

Fredonia was on the south bank of the Sabine River in northern Rusk County. The site is now in central Gregg County on Farm Road 2087 and Interstate Highway 20, 4½ miles southwest of the county courthouse in Longview. The town was established by Haden Edwards, whose earlier colonization efforts had been beset by controversy (see FREDONIAN REBELLION) and whose colonization contract of 1825 had been canceled. Fredonia was located on land that Edwards acquired through a first-class headright. He filed the survey for the site on March 20, 1838. On November 14, 1839, he issued a broadside printed in Nacogdoches advertising the sale of lots in each of two new townsites on the Sabine. The planned towns were Fredonia, some sixty miles north of Nacogdoches, and Cotton-Plant, about forty miles from Fredonia. The territory, "lately occupied by the Northern Indians," was a tract that had been claimed by the Cherokees who first entered Texas in 1819–20 and who numbered about 800 in the early 1830s. The district was also inhabited by members of allied groups from the eastern United States and by two indigenous Caddo groups.

Borders of the district included the Old San Antonio Road to the south, the Sabine River to the north, and the Neches and Angelina rivers to the west and east. Despite repeated attempts, the Cherokees had never been able to establish a secure title to this land, and in the summer of 1839 the Indians living there had been driven out of Texas by President Mirabeau B. Lamar and others antagonistic to their presence (see CHEROKEE WAR). Fredonia was located very near the northeast corner of what had been the Cherokee claim.