Maple Springs

Bogata, at the junction of U.S. Highway 271, State Highway 37, and Farm Road 909 in southwestern Red River County, serves a farming and ranching area and houses employees of firms in Paris, Clarksville, and Mount Pleasant. Oil and gas are produced in the vicinity but not in bonanza quantities. The town's population, which grew slowly through the decades when most of the area was losing ground, reached 1,508 in 1980, when Bogata had a 154-bed nursing home, medical and dental clinics, a locally owned bank, and thirty business establishments.

William and Mary McGill Humphries settled near springs on Little Mustang Creek in 1836 and called the settlement that grew up around them Maple Springs. Humphries had come to the area as a teenager in 1818 with the Nathaniel Robbins party. After his father's death in 1821 he accompanied his mother "back east" but eventually returned to Texas with his young family on learning of Sam Houston's victory at San Jacinto. Mary Humphries's life was a paradigm of the westward movement. She was born in Carolina in 1809 and was four times moved to new frontiers—as an infant to Tennessee, as a child to Alabama, as a young woman to Mississippi, and finally to Texas, where she lived until 1899.