After the war, B. W. Hooks was forced to give up his cotton plantation and moved to northwestern Red River County where he settled at the community of Towson and in 1874 he opened a post office and Towson was changed to Hooks Ferry. The Pecan Point settlement and Hooks Ferry was on the south end of the Texas - Fort Towson - Fort Smith Military Road and was where the road crossed the Red River at an ancient Indian and buffalo crossing. There was never a road built south into Texas from that area of the Red River and immigrants took other routes west and east of Hooks Ferry. In 1841, what was to be the National Road from Pecan Point to the Austin - Coffee's Red River Station Military Road was surveyed but the road was never built.

Cotton was the major crop in Bowie County Texas and slavery was a vitally important economic institution. Thanks to stubborn resistance of the Texas fighting men and Gen. Sheridan's fear of Texas, allowed the entire state to escape the physical destruction that devastated the other parts of the south. However, the end of slavery meant a serious loss of capital for all Southern states.

Since the area depended on slavery to harvest cotton crops, the turmoil of Reconstruction was resposible for the great decline in population of Bowie County between the censuses of 1860 and 1870.