Two city blocks incorporate five historical buildings and a public park, developed under the auspices of the Eastland Community Foundation, organized in 2004 to enhance and sustain Eastland’s buildings. The five-story, red brick and limestone-detailed Eastland County Appraisal District Building (former Exchange National Bank) of 1921 at 102 N. Lamar is a classical design articulated by shallow brick pilasters with Corinthian capitals and concluding with an attic story and a parapet. Spandrels between windows are recessed, giving monumental prominence to the vertical order of pilasters.
At 108 N. Lamar the Connellee-Majestic Theater (1920, Henry T. Phelps) hosted live performances but was heavily remodeled as a movie house in 1947 by Interstate Theaters in a streamlined Art Deco mode, with a prominent marquee, illuminated vertical blade sign, and a stepped plaster facade. The three-story building (1918) at 112 N. Lamar was built during the oil boom and housed the Princess Theater and Stanley Café on the first story and the Stanley Hotel on the upper floors. The tawny brick structure was rehabilitated in 1995 as a boutique hotel, The Eastland.
At 209 W. Main, the Connellee Hotel (1934, Wyatt C. Hedrick) is, at eight stories, the tallest building in Eastland. Constructed by Houston real estate investor Jesse H. Jones on the site of C. U. Connellee’s original homestead, which Connellee donated to the city as a site for a hotel, the building has buff brick walls with Spanish Colonial–styled ornament framing some of the windows and an octagonal tower crowning the elevator. A gallery with slender cast-iron columns extends over the sidewalk, accessible as a balcony from the second floor.
Connellee Plaza, Grimes Memorial Garden, and Old Rip Park are former building lots that have been landscaped with pavers, fountains, and pecan trees as pocket parks; the last provides an eternal resting place for the statue of Old Rip, the horned toad found alive in 1928 in the cornerstone of the 1897 courthouse.