Pulaski Was an Early Panola County Seat on the Sabine

Pulaski is the kind of Panola County place you can miss by following today's courthouse map. It sat on a bluff on the east bank of the Sabine River, about nine miles east of present-day Carthage and due west of present-day Deadwood. It was once known as Walnut Bluff. By the early 1840s it had ferry traffic, wharves, and flatboats moving along the river.

The community carried real civic weight for a short time. A newspaper called the Sabine Advocate was printed there in 1842. Pulaski served as Panola County's seat when the county formed in 1846, gained a post office in 1847, and had a Masonic lodge by the late 1840s.

Then the center of gravity moved inland. Carthage became the permanent seat in 1848, and Pulaski's population had fallen to thirty-three by 1850. The river port came back briefly in 1864-65 for cotton shipping, but the post office closed in 1867. By 1900 Pulaski had faded into a ghost community, leaving the Sabine bluff as the clue to why it mattered.