At first, Longview consisted of about 60 hastily built frame buildings clustered near the intersection of Center and Tyler Streets. It was later said that half of the early buildings were devoted to saloons and gambling. Small new towns of that era had no paving, municipal water supply, or sanitary sewers. The animosities of Reconstruction ran high throughout the South, and railroad construction laborers constituted an unruly element in Longview. The nearest police authorities were the Upshur County justice of the peace and constable, who lived respectively six and nine miles away. However, Longview soon hired a city marshal, and the town was tamed as it grew. The city's population, estimated at 500 in 1876, tripled to 1,525 by 1880.

Part of that population was accommodated by an eastward expansion of the city's streets to what would become known as the Longview Junction neighborhood. In March of 1874, a plat was filed subdividing part of the International Railroad Company's 244 1/2 acres. First Street was laid out along the western edge of that tract. Second through Seventh Streets and Magrill Street were also created. Methvin Street was extended to Sixth Street, North (later Whaley) Street to Seventh Street, and Magrill Street to what became Eighth Street. The International depot is shown lying across the south end of Sixth Street. The one-mile-square city limit lay just west of Fourth Street.

After a fire destroyed the northern half of the wooden town in 1877, brick and stone became the dominant construction materials for commercial buildings. However, the residences remaining from that period are wooden: the F. L. Whaley house built in 1871 on the northeast corner of Whaley and Center Streets, the Rucker (later J. N. Campbell) house built in 1872 at 433 South Center Street (addresses are present-day), the J. C. Turner house built in 1874 at 503 East Methvin Street, the A. A. Womack (later Lacy) house built in 1876 at 411 South Center Street, the T. M. Campbell house built after 1878 at 521 (later moved to 500) North Second Street, the T. A. Flewellen (later Eason) house built in 1879 at 206 South Center Street, and the B. W. Brown (later Birdsong) house built in 1879 at 104 West Whaley Street. In the middle of the main intersection, which was still Tyler and Center Streets, there was a public water well with a hand pump. The first permanent courthouse on the courthouse square, a beautiful brick structure, was dedicated in 1879. In 1877, Longview had about 30 business establishments, a bank, and six church buildings: white and black Methodist, white and black Baptist, Presbyterian, and Christian (Disciples of Christ).

What became the later Santa Fe line running southeast from Longview Junction was begun in 1877 by the locally capitalized Longview and Sabine Valley Railroad Company. Chartered to reach Sabine Pass on the Gulf of Mexico, the company built about 12 miles of track. By 1888, under the Texas, Sabine Valley, and Northwestern Railway, the line was extended to Carthage.

As the railroads opened virgin forests to harvest, 20 steam-powered sawmills were making pine lumber in Gregg County by 1875. The Barner Brothers mill was established at the Junction in the fall of 1871, producing lumber, shingles, flooring, weatherboarding, and the like. By 1877, it had about 50 employees and a capacity of 20,000 board feet of lumber per day. Like many other East Texas towns, Longview looked, sounded, and smelled like a sawmill town until well into the twentieth century.

However, the indispensable cash crop and principal foundation of the entire economy was the same as it had been for the first pioneers about 1847 and would remain until the oil boom: cotton. Rail transport, together with barbed wire and other agricultural innovations, allowed an increasing populace to be engaged primarily in growing cotton on more and more acres of less and less desirable soil. Cotton and corn respectively occupied about one-half and one-third of the cultivated acreage of Gregg County. The corn provided fuel for the mules and the staple of the human diet.

The black population of the area that became Gregg county, growing from about 24% to 55% between 1850 and 1880, provided a correspondingly increasing proportion of the labor. Longview's African-Americans lived chiefly in a ring of houses around the edges of the city. Traces of that ring endured for well over a century. Among other occupations, many blacks worked in the sawmills and in Kelly Plow Works, which moved to Longview from Kellyville near Jefferson in 1882.

Located on both sides of High Street just south of the T&P track, Kelly Plow became well known throughout the South-especially for a popular light turning plow called the Kelly Blue. The Plow Works remained Longview's chief non-sawmill industry until the oil boom.