Local Stories in Burnet County
Texas·4 places
History
Birdie Harwood
Marble Falls elected a woman mayor in April 1917, eleven months before white women could vote in a Texas primary and three years before the Nineteenth Amendment, which means Ophelia Geraldine Crosby Harwood was put into office entirely by men. She campaigned on the argument that running a town was like running a household, and that rich men did not want the job while poor men could not afford it.
History
Burnam's Hole
A limestone shaft in Burnet County was called Burnam's hole until sometime after the Civil War, and then it acquired the name it carries now, because of what was thrown down it. The state marker at the mouth says the pit is believed to have received up to seventeen bodies, and names the pro-Union judge John R.
History
The Capitol Granite
The Texas Capitol is pink because the limestone near Austin had iron in it and stained when it weathered, and because the Capitol Board and Governor John Ireland held out for Texas stone against a proposal to substitute limestone from Bedford, Indiana. The owners of Granite Mountain, George W. Lacy, Nimrod L. Norton and William H.
History
The Drowned Falls
The town is named for a waterfall that has been under a lake since 1951, and the rock was never marble. The falls were a shelf of limestone running across the Colorado, hard and cherty enough that early settlers took it for marble and the name stuck.
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.
