Local Stories in Blanco County
Texas·5 places
History
Pedernales Electric Co-op
The Rural Electrification Administration would not serve the Hill Country because of an arithmetic rule: it wanted three families per mile of line, and the country between Johnson City and Fredericksburg had nothing like that.
History
Round Mountain
Joseph Bird settled between Cypress Creek and the Pedernales in about 1854 with his wife Eliza and six children, built a log house, and gave his name to a settlement called Birdtown that had been renamed Round Mountain by the time its post office opened in 1857, the second in what became Blanco County.
History
The Courthouse War
Blanco held its county seat by seven votes. The county was created in February 1858 with a requirement that its seat sit within five miles of the centre, and by 1862 the legislature had carved off Kendall County and compensated Blanco County with pieces of Hays and Burnet, which left the town of Blanco nowhere near the middle of anything. The northern end of the county wanted the courthouse moved.
History
The Johnson Settlement
The president's grandfather ran the largest trail driving outfit in Blanco and six neighbouring counties from a 960 acre homestead on the Pedernales, and he lost it. Between 1867 and 1871 Sam Ealy Johnson Senior and his brother Tom sent several herds of two and a half to three thousand longhorns a season up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene, Kansas, working pens at Williamson's Creek and Deer Creek.
History
The Swearing-In at Hye
On 3 November 1965 a Postmaster General of the United States was sworn into the cabinet on the porch of a country store, and the president who swore him in used the occasion to make a point about his own childhood. Lawrence F.
Elsewhere in Texas
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
