The History of Jacksonville, Texas

The community began around 1847 as a small settlement called Gum Creek, in the rolling Piney Woods of Cherokee County between the county seat of Rusk to the south and Tyler to the north. In 1850 it was renamed Jacksonville — honoring Jackson Smith, an early settler who built a home and blacksmith shop and became postmaster in 1848, as well as Dr. William Jackson.

It was a typical antebellum East Texas farm town, dependent on the surrounding agriculture and isolated from the wider world — until the railroad arrived and changed everything, as it did across the region.

Jacksonville's defining early event was the arrival of the railroad in 1872. When the International–Great Northern Railroad built its line a short distance from the existing town, Jacksonville did what a number of ambitious 19th-century towns did: it relocated. The community picked up and moved roughly a mile and a half to cluster around the new railroad, abandoning the original 'Old Jacksonville' site for a new town center along the tracks.

The move paid off. As a railroad town, Jacksonville became a shipping and trading hub for Cherokee County's farms, and the rail connection set the stage for the industry that would make the town famous: tomatoes.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the sandy soils and climate around Jacksonville proved ideal for growing tomatoes, and the railroad made it possible to ship them fresh to distant markets. The area exploded into one of the most important tomato-producing and shipping regions in the country, and Jacksonville proudly claimed the title Tomato Capital of the World. At the industry's peak, the town's economy revolved around the tomato harvest and the rail cars that carried the crop north.

The tomato heritage is stamped all over Jacksonville to this day. The town's WPA-era football stadium is named the Tomato Bowl, and the annual Tomato Fest each June celebrates the crop that built the town. Even as large-scale commercial tomato growing has shifted elsewhere, the identity has stuck.

The Jacksonville of today is a diverse city of about 14,000, with a notably young population that is roughly evenly split between White and Hispanic residents, plus a significant Black community. Its economy has broadened beyond agriculture into poultry processing, manufacturing — including the longtime Texas Basket Company — healthcare, and retail, serving as a commercial center for southern Cherokee County.

Education has long been part of the town's identity. Lon Morris College, a historic Methodist junior college, operated in Jacksonville until it closed in 2012, and Jacksonville College, a Baptist institution, continues to operate along with a theological seminary. The town remains tied to the rhythms of East Texas small-city life — high school football at the Tomato Bowl, recreation at Lake Jacksonville, and a heritage rooted in the railroad and the tomato. Tyler's larger amenities are only about 30 miles north.