First surveyed as a township in 1807 and established in 1816, Sugartown became an early settlement in the region, serving as a way station for cattlemen driving herds to Alexandria and Opelousas and for pioneers heading west into Texas. In its rugged setting, residents pooled supplies and labor to build mills for flour and sugar and gins for cotton, helping create communities out of necessity. Known as the "Queen City of the Frontier," Sugartown gained a reputation as one of the area's earliest and most progressive settlements, with the region's most prestigious early school, one of its first churches, its earliest cemetery, and the first cotton gin west of the Calcasieu River, which operated there for more than 40 years. Though never incorporated, it stood as the center of organized community life for the earliest residents of No Man's Land. Its Sam Todd Lodge #182, established in 1867 as the first Mason lodge west of the Calcasieu River, helped keep peace, settle disputes, remove threats, secure local law officers, issue loans, and safeguard valuables. Traditions about the town's name connect it either to a wagonload of sugar that overturned at a creek crossing or to a cook who let cane juice boil too long until it became sugar. Sugartown also became an early stop on a star mail route from Lake Charles to a town near Leesville, bringing weekly mail after long periods without service, and it eventually built a freestanding post office that legend recognized as the world's smallest. Around 1870, the one-room Sugartown Male and Female Academy offered children of Sugartown and surrounding communities an education that residents believed could rescue the area from illiteracy; led first by Columbia University graduate W.H. Baldwin, it drew students from surrounding parishes and east Texas, but lasted only two years despite producing future doctors, business leaders, sheriffs, teachers, judges, and politicians. In the years after the Civil War, when communities had to build and maintain their own schools and families bore the costs of education, local families accepted those burdens because education offered opportunity beyond farm life. By the 1870s, No Man's Land also drew settlers to affordable western lands, but disputed grants, squatting, and violent land conflicts were common. In a region without banks or safes, farmers hid documents and valuables in "post hole banks," sometimes said to be protected by haints, and legends of buried treasure and glowing spirits lingered in the swamps, woods, and farmland.