Before the Civil War, Choctaw people lived in varied ways, with some practicing subsistence farming in isolated rural settings, some operating commercial farms, some establishing plantations, and others settling in communities such as Doaksville. Growing up around Josiah Doak's trading post near Fort Towson, Doaksville became a thriving commercial center by the 1840s, with regular mail service, mercantiles, craft shops, a gristmill, hotel, tavern, jail, council house, church, and resident physician, and it served as the Choctaw national capital from 1850 to 1863. Rural subsistence farmers lived in modest log cabins near small clearings, raised crops such as pumpkins, beans, corn, Irish and sweet potatoes, and melons, gathered wild foods including walnuts, pecans, and plums, raised livestock, and hunted wild game. Choctaws engaged in commercial agriculture typically lived on relatively small southern-style farms that used family labor supplemented by a few enslaved African Americans, often in larger two-story log dogtrot houses, and produced cash crops including corn, cotton, and wheat. Large plantations were less common in the Choctaw Nation, but some matched the success and grandeur of the antebellum South, with mansion-style dwellings, large enslaved labor forces, and substantial surpluses, as in the Doaksville area plantations of Robert M. Jones, who lived at Rose Hill Plantation and managed four other plantations with about 500 slaves.