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.