JACKSONVILLE — Editor’s note: The following is the first of four parts of a history of motor tourist sites in Cherokee and Nacogdoches counties, written by Thanasis Kombos, a Jacksonville resident who is currently a history major at Stephen F. Austin State University. Kombos prefaced his submission of this paper to the Daily Progress with a letter explaining his motivation for sending his work for publication. A portion of his letter prefaces this section of his paper. The subsequent parts of his paper will be printed on the coming three Sundays.



A letter from the author: Through the research and writing of the “The Humble Origins of a Forgotten Transformation,” there were certain individuals that I must not fail to recognize as fundamental contributors to the completion of my article. Firstly, I wish to extend particular thanks to Miller Thompson of Jacksonville, Marie Whitehead of Rusk, and Shelley Cleaver of Jacksonville, whose information and insight on the topic of my research proved invaluable. Additionally, I would also like to thank Nancy Golemon, A.C. Jenkins, Syble and Don Wood, John and Madeleine Ross and my mother Kate Kombos, for their assistance in my endeavor as well. Moreover, I would like humbly to submit that my article is by no means a collection of all the information and historical memory of the motor tourist accommodations of the first half of the last century in our area. I am therefore including my personal email address (kombostn@titan.sfasu.edu) so that anyone who knows of something that I was unable to recover in my research or anyone whom simply wishes to contact me for whatever reason regarding the article, may do so. The writing of history is an ongoing and ever-improving process, and I readily acknowledge this fact.





Driving into Jacksonville on Texas Highway 204 from Nacogdoches, sits County Road 1401, also known as O’Keefe Road. Take a right on 1401 and at once a thick stretch of woods on the right-hand side, heavily grown up with underbrush, will come into view.

Peering into the wood from the edge of the road, one will notice an ancient-looking crepe myrtle, a witness to the past, a sentry and guard to something long hidden and tucked away.

One may wonder why such a tree of its age and beauty lives on the side of what seems just another ordinary Texas country road. Perhaps for those uninterested or unaware individuals, who drive by its location daily, the tree has never provoked a second thought.

On the other hand, adventurous fellows, driven by curiosity, may take the time to park their cars and have a look in the thicket behind this old tree — for which they will find their due reward. For what is concealed, only a few paces into the brush, are several small concrete foundations and the crumbling stone walls of structures deserted many years ago.

Although many of the memories of this place have drifted away, its history, and the history of a world not so long removed from modern day, remains largely untold.

Today, scattered across the Texas landscape, one finds, in most towns of modest size, the bedrock of current travelling accommodations: The Holiday Inns, the Best Westerns, and many others. However, these corporate hotel and motel chains, were not always a part of people’s lives, nor were they the originators of the motor hotel industry.

Hitching yards, public city campgrounds, rustic travel lodges, and finally fully equipped motor courts, were among the early roadside abodes for automobile travelers. Their rise to prominence in East Texas, and for that matter, the entirety of the United States, was not merely a byproduct of modern highway construction or an extension of widespread automobile ownership, but a deeper reflection of a change in recreational and social culture, still evident in the present day.

It may seem natural now, how, with the introduction of automobiles, railroads as a means of private transportation so quickly diminished. Yet, taking time to consider the magnitude of this change in transportation, reveals that having the ability to hop in a “T-model” and drive across county on a whim created a freedom in America never before experienced by its citizens.

Instead of working around the schedule of the railroad, having to take multiple trains, and stopping at every town with a rail depot, by the 1920s, a majority of middle and upper class families in East Texas owned at least one automobile.

Because automobiles allowed for so much freedom in travel to the individuals who owned them, much of contemporary historical literature has focused on what cars did to people? In order to diverge from this trend it is appropriate to examine instead the evolution of motor tourist accommodations in Cherokee and Nacogdoches counties, and explore not the impact cars had on people but, more exactly, what people did using their cars.

While today travelers enjoy the luxuries of high-speed internet and continental breakfasts, the first motor tourists, wishing to commune with nature, relished the idea of taking off down the open road and putting up for the night in a farmer’s field, next to a spring-fed creek or under the protection of a large post oak. Often repulsed by the notion of staying in large, stuffy hotels in city downtowns, these first, true warriors of the road, covered in dust and dressed in their driving clothes, preferred the liberty of driving right up to a good spot and calling it home for the night.  

Unfortunately, as the number of motorists continued to increase, so too did the “no camping” signs; by 1920, 12 million motorists were criss-crossing American roads. Municipalities acted first to address the situation by providing accommodations to the growing number of motorists, setting aside land within a town for the sole purpose of tourist housing.

From East Texas, one of the best examples of these municipal autocamping parks is Aqua Vitae Park, formerly in Nacogdoches.