Old Town Spring, the historic centre of Spring in north Harris County, grew up as a railroad town. The Houston and Great Northern Railroad built through in 1871 and platted the town in 1873, the year Callahan Pickette became its first postmaster. German farmers had worked the land since the mid-1840s, Carl Wunsche the best known of them, raising cotton and sugar cane. After the International-Great Northern linked Spring with Fort Worth in 1901 to 1903, a roundhouse and railway shops were built, and Spring became a major switchyard, with fourteen trackyards and some 200 railroad workers. Its population was put at 1,200 in 1910. The railroads also fed a lumber industry, and Spring had mills large and small in the lumber boom.
With them came hotels, saloons, an opera house, gambling houses, a hospital and a bank, and in 1907 residents founded the Spring Independent School District. In 1923 the roundhouse moved to Houston. With the railroad jobs gone and Prohibition closing the saloons, the hotels and other rail businesses shut during the 1920s, and by 1931 about 300 people lived in Spring.
The town held on, keeping its school district and starting a volunteer fire department in the 1950s. Suburban Houston reached it in the 1970s, the Old Town Spring Association formed in 1980, and by 1989 the old streets held more than eighty specialty shops. A state marker telling the town's story stands at 403 Main Street, beside the Spring Historical Museum.
Getting there
30.0789, -95.4221
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
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