The first Anglo-American settlers crossing the Brazos River here into Indian lands in 1854 included Elizabeth Crockett, the widow of David Crockett, who brought her family from Tennessee to claim a league of land awarded to heirs of Texas Revolution veterans (she died here in 1860). Brothers J. and J. H. Nutt donated forty acres for a town site in 1866. The arrival of the Fort Worth and Rio Grande Railway in 1887 spurred Granbury’s growth, as evidenced by the many stone buildings of the period on the courthouse square. A dam built across the Brazos in 1969 formed Lake Granbury and attracted new development and a renewed interest in Granbury’s history. The courthouse square, the first in Texas to be listed (1974) on the National Register of Historic Places, was the model for the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Main Street Program. Virtually the entire town has been surveyed (2008) and included in two types of historic overlay districts.
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