Local Stories in Bastrop County
Texas·7 places
Industry & Science
McDade Pottery
Before refrigeration, a household in this country kept its food alive inside fired clay, and for half a century a good deal of that clay came from McDade. The works descended from a jug shop started in 1853 near what is now Bastrop State Park, which moved to McDade in the late 1870s to be nearer better clay. The deposits that mattered lay along Marshy Branch, four miles east of town. Robert L.
History
Paige's Seven Cotton Gins
Paige is named for the engineer who drew the line it sits on. Norman Paige laid out the route of the Houston and Texas Central through this part of Bastrop County, and in 1872 a water tower stop on that route took his name. A post office followed in 1874, and the station moved three miles east in 1876.
History
Puesta del Colorado
Bastrop exists because of a shallow place in the Colorado River. A rock shoal downstream gave the crossing a firm bottom, and the Old San Antonio Road detoured about a quarter of a mile up Gills Branch to use the creek's gentle banks rather than scale the Colorado's steep east bank directly. Spanish soldiers built a small post at the ford and called it Puesta del Colorado.
History
The Alum Creek Fort
Where Alum Creek runs into the Colorado, families from Lincoln County, Missouri put up a log fort in the late 1820s and built their cabins around it. They had come in under Stephen F. Austin's second colony contract, and the families named on the state marker are the Winslow Turners, the Stephen Cottles and the Ahijah Highsmiths.
Industry & Science
The Butler Brickworks
Michael Butler came out of Limerick to New York in 1866, learned the bricklayer's trade as a helper, and founded his own brick company in Austin in 1873. What he was really looking for was clay, and he found it here, at a siding the Texas and New Orleans Railroad had reached in 1871, five miles east of Elgin. The works grew onto a thousand acres and the settlement around it took the family name.
History
The Flood That Made Elgin
Elgin exists because the Colorado River flooded in 1869. The Houston and Texas Central had intended to run southwest from McDade, strike the river somewhere between Bastrop and Webberville, and follow the water into Austin.
History
The Notch Cutters
On Christmas Eve of 1883, forty or fifty armed men walked into the Rock Front Saloon at McDade, took three men out of it, and hanged all three from a single tree somewhere in the brush. The dead were said to belong to a gang of cattle and horse thieves the country knew as the notch cutters, and no source explains how the gang got that name.
Elsewhere in Texas
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