The Place

San Augustine County unlike the rest of Texas that we all tend to imagine as flat prairie and open sky is Timberland. Densely condensed pine forest with thick brush and bramble. Bayous emerge from it like watery oasis while creeks and rivers run with murky reddish brown water. Beneath this muddy water are lethal black water moccasins, snapping turtles, frogs, toads crawdad or crayfish and beaver. The beaver create the Bayous where trees emerge from water with low hanging limbs and moss -- and I heard tell that snakes will drop in your boat when you glide underneath them.

San Augustine is the oldest town in Texas, founded in 183. While perusing the internet expansive lawns are seen around houses. In "real" life you will observe that all that land had to be cleared of densely packed forest. It's nearly impossible to walk through and with all the copperhead, water mocs and fire ants who would want to? For one, the Ayish Indians were the first to inhabit the area, then the French, the Spaniards and Europeans. It was and still is an easy place to get lost in which made it attractive to  lawless criminals hiding from the law.  It still is.

Eventually, freed slaves who were given land settled here. Each slave was given forty acres when freed.
While slavery was never essential to the Texas economy as it was to the South, there were parts of the state- especially Eastern portions- where slavery flourished to some extent. San Augustine was one of those areas.