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Please add profiles of those who were born, lived or died in Freestone County, Texas.
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History
Archeological evidence of the farming Kichai band of the Caddoan Mississippian culture dates to 200 BC in the area.
The Hernando de Soto expedition of 1541 resulted in violent encounters with the Caddo Native Americans who occupied the area. Spanish and French missionaries carried smallpox, measles, malaria, and influenza as endemic diseases; the Caddo suffered epidemics as they had no acquired immunity to these new diseases. Eventually, the Caddo were forced to reservations.
The Tawakoni branch of Wichita Indians originated as a tribe north of Texas, but migrated south into east Texas. From 1843 onward, the Tawakoni were part of treaties made by both the Republic of Texas and the United States. The name of the Tawakoni was also sometimes spelled as Tehuacana.
In 1826, empresario David G. Burnet received a grant from the Coahuila y Tejas legislature to settle 300 families. By contracting how many families each grantee could settle, the government sought to have some control over colonization.
The threat of Indian hostilities kept most from homesteading in Freestone County until the Treaty of Bird's Fort. Within three years of the treaty, colonization, primarily from Southern states, had been so successful that the counties surrounding Freestone had already been organized. In 1850 the Texas legislature formed Freestone County from Limestone County. Freestone is a descriptive name referring to the quality of the soil. The county was organized in 1851. Fairfield was designated as the county seat. Of the county's total 1860 population of 6,881, more than half were slaves.
Freestone County voted 585–3 in favor of secession from the Union. After the Civil War, while the loss of slave labor may have hurt the planters in the local county economy, by the end of Reconstruction, the number of farms doubled. There were more smaller farms than before the war. Continuing economic and social tensions after Reconstruction resulted in whites lynching blacks to keep them in place as second-class citizens. Freestone County had nine such lynchings from 1877 into the early 20th century, most around the turn of the century. This was the fifth-highest total in the state.
In 1969, the Texas Utilities Generating Company located a new power plant near Fairfield called Big Brown Power Plant. A dam was built to create Fairfield Lake to provide stored water for a cooling system for the plant. Fairfield Lake State Park was established around the lake and opened to the public in 1976. Big Brown was shut down in February 2018.
Adjacent Counties
Cities, Towns & Communities
- Coutchman
- Dew
- Donie
- Fairfield (County Seat)
- Freestone
- Kirvin
- Oakwood (part)
- Streetman (part)
- Teague
- Wortham
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