Behind the Fort Towson Cemetery stood Doaksville, the largest town in what is now southeastern Oklahoma during the 1840s and 1850s. In 1847, Rev. P.P. Brown described it as a small place of fifty or sixty people made up mostly of traders and mechanics, with six stores, two saddler shops, one tailor, one blacksmith, one cabinet shop, one shoemaker shop, a drug store, and a public house. Created by the Choctaws and eventually joined by the Chickasaw, it became an important political, cultural, and economic center connected to other places in Indian Territory and beyond by roads and Red River transport. Doaksville flourished with the rest of the Choctaw Nation until the Civil War changed Indian Territory forever and sent the town into decline. Its end came when the last remnants of the town were relocated around 1900 to what is now the community of Fort Towson.