Bastrop traces its beginnings to a small fort, Puesta del Colorado, established in 1804 at the junction of the Old San Antonio Road (Camino Real) and the Colorado River. Felipe Enrique Neri, Baron de Bastrop, provided the name for the community as he...
Named for Byrd Lockhart, deputy surveyor for the 1820s colony of Green DeWitt, the town is the county seat of Caldwell County, formed out of early Mexican land grants. The agricultural Blackland Prairie covers most of this county that lies in the Guadalupe...
Located in southeast Hays County, San Marcos lies on the Old Spanish Road (Camino Real) from San Antonio to east Texas and is home to Texas State University, whose most distinguished alumnus was Lyndon B. Johnson (1930). The downtown is a hub of activity...
The county seat from 1858 until 1890, Blanco was established on a tract of land donated by the Pittsburgh Land Company. The first county courthouse was built in 1860, and a Masonic university planned in 1874 was abandoned due to lack of funds. The town...
Johnson City was founded by James Polk Johnson in the 1870s, and supplanted Blanco as the seat of county government in 1890. The town is most famous for its association with President Lyndon B. Johnson, a descendant of the town's founder, who was born near...
The first attempts to establish a town here at the falls of the Colorado River in the mid-1850s failed due to lack of interest. With the chartering of the Texas Mining and Improvement Company in 1887 and the arrival of the Austin and Northwestern Railroad in...
Founded as Hamilton in 1852, the town was renamed in 1858. The arrival of the Austin and Northwestern Railroad in 1882 made Burnet the trade center for several surrounding counties. Wool was a major commodity. Stone quarried from Granite Mountain, fourteen miles...
Georgetown, founded in 1848, is the county seat of Williamson County and lies at the fork of the North and South San Gabriel rivers. Named for George Washington Glasscock who donated the land for the new town, it served an agricultural community for most of...
In 1876, representatives of the Texas Land Company developed the community awaiting the arrival of the International and Great Northern Railway. Named for Edward Moses Taylor, a railroad official, the town was settled by immigrants from Czechoslovakia and other...
In 1848, James Nolan established a stagecoach stop at the intersection of the La Bahía and San Antonio–Nacogdoches roads and the Indian trail from Waco. By the mid-1850s four stage lines were operating at this convenient crossing of the Navasota River, and in...
Grimes County is on the edge of the east Texas pine forests and is named for Jesse Grimes, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence and early settler in the area. The county was among the earliest settled by Stephen F. Austin's colonists. Jared Groce...
A site on the Houston and Texas Central Railway was chosen in 1871 for Texas A&M College, taking its “College Station” name from the train stop. The area north of the campus grew as a commercial district that was linked with Bryan by an electric...
The area was settled by members of Stephen F. Austin's colony in the 1820s and 1830s and land for a townsite was donated in 1859 by William Joel Bryan to the Houston and Texas Central Railway. Rail construction stopped eighteen miles to the south during the Civil...
Hearne developed as a major railroad community in the late nineteenth century at the junction of the Houston and Texas Central Railway that arrived in 1868 and the International and Great Northern Railway that arrived after 1870. The two railroads shared a depot...
Named for Robert Calvert, a descendent of Lord Baltimore and an early planter in the county, the community owed its existence to the Houston and Texas Central Railway that Calvert promoted, which arrived in 1868. In 1870 Calvert became county seat but lost the...
Cameron became the county seat in 1846 and was named for Scottish immigrant Ewen Cameron, who was prominent in the Texas Revolution. The town remained a small trading center until the arrival of the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway in 1881. This established its...
Founded in 1881, Temple formed around the tracks and stations of the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway. The strong rail presence established the town's grid pattern. Temple was named in honor of Bernard Moore Temple, civil engineer and former surveyor with the...
Belton is the county seat for Bell County, formed in 1850 from the earlier Robertson colony. Two railroads served the town, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe and the Missouri, Kansas and Texas (MKT), both arriving in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The...
Waco, one of the state's most important cities, was named after Waco Village, a Native American community along the Brazos River. Laid out in 1849, Waco became the county seat of McLennan County shortly thereafter, the center of a growing cotton...
Marlin, founded in 1867, once flourished as an agricultural community, principally cotton cultivation along the Brazos River bottoms. The river flows over a number of natural falls in the county and that may have determined the county's name. Two railroads, the...
The county seat is named for Abram Groesbeck, a director of the Houston and Texas Central Railway, which came through the town in 1870. Though never a large community, it is now near active oil and gas fields and a lignite coal plant that has...
Established as a railroad town in 1870 on the Houston and Texas Central Railway, the town incorporated in 1873 on land donated by the son and daughter of General José Antonio Mexía, Mexican senator, soldier, and promoter of Texas colonization. About 1885, Robert...
This small community is named for the Tawakoni Indians who lived nearby in the early nineteenth century. The Tehuacana Academy opened here in 1852 and residents settled around the natural springs. The population grew to around 500 in 1890 and then the town...
South Central Texas encompasses the so-called Hill Country, one of the most distinctive geographical regions of the state. Its geology includes two major features, the Edwards Plateau to the west and the Balcones Escarpment to the east and south. The vegetation is dominated by...
As the cultural and economic metropolis of South Central Texas, San Antonio is the only major city in Texas that can trace its history back to the eighteenth century. The creation of San Antonio de Bexar Presidio in 1718 was the product of the Spanish colonial...
Bounded by Durango Boulevard, S. Alamo and Guenther streets, and the San Antonio River, the small neighborhood of King William is San Antonio's most famous residential area, its first designated historic district (1968) and Texas's first National Register Historic...
The south side of San Antonio below the King William District is an area that is linked to the history of the four mission churches that were founded here in the eighteenth century. In recognition of the importance of these sites, in 1983 the National Park...
Olmos Park, an independent, incorporated suburb now engulfed by the city, was developed in 1927 by H. C. Thorman four miles north of the city on sixteen hundred acres of land. The plan was dominated by a series of curving streets radiating from a central circle in the...
In 1890 the Denver-based Chamberlin American Investment Company began development of Alamo Heights on a 3.4-square-mile tract 5 miles northeast of the center of the city on land settled in the mid-1800s by George Washington Brackenridge and Charles Anderson. Working through...
Covering 640 acres Terrell Hills is the largest of the autonomous, incorporated areas on the north side of the city. Development began in the first decade of the twentieth century as a country estate section, although extensive residential construction did not begin until...
