JACKSON, ANDREW (1817-1895). Andrew Jackson, early newspaper publisher, was born in Georgia on March 17, 1817. He settled in Rusk, Texas, around 1850. By March of that year he and John Benjamin Longqv had founded a weekly, the Cherokee Sentinel, the first newspaper in Cherokee County. In 1855 the Sentinel was published by Jackson and William R. Wiggins and edited by Thomas J. Johnson. Johnson retired in late 1856, and a short time later Jackson and Wiggins sold the paper. In 1865 Jackson established the Texas Observer. In 1877 he became district clerk of Cherokee County and held the office until his resignation in 1891. Jackson, a prominent Mason, was an officer in Euclid Lodge No. 45 from 1851 until 1869. From 1858 to 1861 he was coeditor with W. T. Yeomans of the Texas Freemason, official organ of the Texas Grand Lodge. He was junior deacon of the grand lodge in 1859 and deputy grand master of the fourth Masonic district in 1872. He died in Rusk on May 24, 1895. Jackson and his wife, Eliza, are buried in Cedar Hill Cemetery, near the eastern outskirts of Rusk.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Helen Wooddell Crawford, Cemeteries of Mid Cherokee County, Texas (1973). Dallas Morning News, May 26, 1895. Hattie Joplin Roach, A History of Cherokee County (Dallas: Southwest, 1934). Marilyn M. Sibley, Lone Stars and State Gazettes: Texas Newspapers before the Civil War (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1983).
