Cooks Point

Duane's take

Here's the official marker telling it straight, and I'll give it my best go round the campfire. Cooks Point, Burleson County. Founded about 1840, right where a colonial road coming up from the southeast crossed the old San Antonio Road.

Two roads meeting in the middle of nowhere has a way of turning into somewhere, and that's exactly what happened here. A settler named Gabriel Jackson was already on the ground, and he'd built himself a two-story log cabin that doubled as a trading post. Two stories.

Log cabin. Out there on the Texas frontier, that was not a modest undertaking. That was a man saying, I intend to stay.

Now, the community itself got its name not from Jackson, but from a surveyor, Silas L. Cooke, who had walked and measured a good deal of the land in that vicinity. Survey work is thankless business.

You tramp through brush, you mark your lines, you move on, and more often than not somebody else builds the town. But Cooks Point carries Silas Cooke's name to this day, which is something. Two roads, a two-story trading post, a surveyor's careful work, and by 1969 when this marker was set down, Cooks Point had become a thriving rural village.

Some places earn their existence one road crossing at a time.

What the marker says

Founded about 1840 where colonial road from southeast crossed San Antonio Road. Settler Gabriel Jackson had two-story log cabin-trading post here. Community was named for Silas L. Cooke, who surveyed much land in this vicinity. It is now a thriving rural village. (1969)