Freestone County, Texas Reflections History of navigation on Trinity River By Bill Young At the end of last week’s article, I mentioned this week’s article would be about the acquisition of some very important historical documents. I have discovered I still need a few more facts so that article will be postponed for a short time. Instead I have chosen to write several articles about the history of navigation on the Trinity River. Over the past 35 years, I have worked as an archeological consultant for Southern Methodist University on a number of projects. At the end of each project when the final analysis of the material was completed, the archeologists were required to furnish a report of their findings and I was fortunate to receive a copy of each report. As soon as I received one of the publications, I would scan though each book looking at the photographs and drawings to see what I might recognize or what I had missed during the project. Two of these projects dealt with the Trinity River. The first one was known as the Tennessee Colony Lake Project. This lake, if it had been built, would have covered approximately 145,000 acres of land and would affect four, almost five counties. Freestone and Anderson counties would have been affected first because the dam site chosen for this project would span the Trinity several miles downstream from where U.S. Highway 287 crosses the river. Then the lake would back up covering a lot of the area surrounding the channel and flood plain of Tehuacana Creek, all of the land currently covered by the Richland- Chambers Reservoir, all of the land within the Trinity River flood plain up to the State Highway 85 crossing going to Seven Points, and up Cedar Creek to the dam and spillway of Cedar Creek Lake. Needless to say, this was going to be a huge water reservoir. The archeologists with SMU decided the best and most economical way to survey part of this project was to place several transects across selected portions of the proposed lake. By surveying these transects, they would have a general idea about how many sites might be affected by the entire lake. I was fortunate to go out with some of the crews from time to time giving me the opportunity to see other areas which I was not familiar with. At a later date, I plan to write some more about this extremely large archeological survey. The second project which came along shortly after the Tennessee Lake Project was a survey of the entire Trinity River basin from Dallas to Galveston Bay. This survey was in advance of the voters along the river voting on whether to turn the Trinity River into a canal for the purpose of transporting goods along the river. Recently I have been re-reading the final report which was originally published after their survey in 1976 and 1977. Titled “A Reconnaissance Survey of the Trinity River Basin,” the book was assembled by Jeffrey J. Richner and Joe T. Bagot. I remember both of these young archeologists quite well but I am not sure where either one is currently working. I have to use the word young for most of the students I worked with over the years since I was 20 or more years older than they were. Still in those days I could hold my own walking across fields with them, but today my back does not want to cooperate. There are several sections in this publication which I found interesting dealing with navigation on the river and early settlements located along the main channel. I want to start off by discussing the navigation of the Trinity River. Think back to those very early days when Texas was first getting settled. Stephen F. Austin had his first settlement in the area surrounding Austin and there were other early settlements along the Gulf Coast and East Texas but roads were almost nonexistent except for narrow trails. The transportation of any goods took weeks and months to reach the interior of Texas depending on whether the streams were in flood stage or marauding Native Americans were making raids into certain areas. With these major problems facing settlers or people who wanted to start up a settlement, many people were looking towards the navigation of the rivers. There was some navigation on the Brazos River up as far as near Hearne but the river elevations fluctuated so much, and in turn limited the number of days a boat could go up this far. Last year we visited the site of an old ghost town and one story we were told by the current landowner stated a few boats were successful in arriving at the town site and were turned into gambling houses and other unsavory choices. These boats stayed tied up at the docks until there was a sufficient rise in the river, allowing the flat bottom boats to proceed down river to the gulf. Several interested people decided the Trinity River might be better suited for transportation. John Neely Bryan, the founder of Dallas, with the help of a few other men tried in 1843 to burn a major logjam blocking the river near Dallas. They knew the entire logjam would not burn due to portions of logs and trees immersed in the water but they thought if enough of the jam was successfully burned, the next major rise on the river might sweep the remaining logs downstream. The book does not state whether this was a successful endeavor. In the same year of 1843, Colonel Jacob Eliot, acting on the behalf of a private development corporation, was contracted to make a survey of various routes into Texas needed to attract settlers. One option he looked at was the navigation of part of the Trinity. He stated that the area from the Three Forks of the River downstream to the settlement of Magnolia could be considered feasible. John Neely Bryan along with John Crockett and the Rev. James A. Smith, all representing Dallas, attended a convention held on navigation at Huntsville, Ala. The convention represented the first organized concern for seeking improvement to the channel. There wasn’t any immediate result from this convention. In 1852, the first experiment at commercially navigating the Trinity from Dallas took place. The Rev. James A. Smith, mentioned above, built a flatboat by sawing gunwales out of cottonwood trees with a whipsaw. However the book does not state if he was successful with this first experiment. Please note the year mentioned when this experiment took place. There are some local history books which refer to river traffic locally earlier than this date. Much of this local history was based on hand-me-down memories or inaccurate fiction, not proven facts. Next week: Boats and landings on the Trinity River