The
remains of Cuthand, a town with one of the most unusual names in East
Texas, are scattered around the intersection of Farm Roads 1487 and 916 seven
miles east of Bogata in Red River
County.
Originally known as Enterprise as it was being settled
by cotton planters around 1850, the town began
to grow in the l860s when E.A. Mauldin established a grist mill and cotton gin
and Samuel T. Arnold opened a general store.
By 1867, the community had
enough people to justify a post office, and its first postmaster, Cornelius Crenshaw,
named the post office for Cuthand Creek.
The creek supposedly got
its name from a Deleware Indian chief who accompanied Frank Hopkins, a soldier
in the battle of Tippecanoe, from Indiana to Texas
in 1823.
The chief had lost three fingers from a sabor’s slash in his younger
days and because of his difigurement, he was forever known as Cuthand.
The
creek bearing his name was named by General Thomas J. Rusk of Nacogdoches,
a close friend of the old chief.
An
old legend says that immediately after the war, a well-groomed man known as Professor
Dobbs came to Cuthand and applied for a job as the teacher that fall. Dobbs was
hired and, taught during the year. After the school’s closing in the spring, he
left the community. It was later learned that he was William Clarke Quantrill,
leader of perhaps the most savage fighting unit in the Civil War.
Quantrill,
indeed, was a schoolteacher in Ohio and Kansas and brought his guereillas to a
camp on the Red River near Sherman
during the winters of 1862, 1863 and 1864.
The climax of Quantrill's guerilla
career came on August 21, 1863, when he led a force of 450 raiders into Lawrence,
Kansas, a stronghold of pro-Union support, and set the torch to much of the city.
Quantrill was eventually killed on a raid into Kentucky in 1865.
As Cuthand
thrived from a cotton economy, people began to settle aound the community. Six
doctors practiced in the town, an indication that it was growing.
By
1880, Cuthand had a population of 130 people, two cotton gins, a church and a
school. The town’s population reached 150 in 1890 but begun to decline by 1896.
In 1914, ninety-one residents lived in the community and it had ninety-six from
1920 through 1956.
The town lost its post office in the 1950s and in 1986
the community reported only thirty-one residents and no businesses.
You
can learn more about William Clarke Quantrill in East
Texas from “A Civil War Tragedy” by John Wilkins of Tyler,
which can be puchased from the East Texas Historical Association in Nacogdoches.
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