Local Stories in Fayette County
Texas·9 places
History
Carmine, Once Sylvan
The town was platted under the name Sylvan, and the name it carries now is not a colour. It was renamed for Newton Carmean, and on the fifteenth of June 1892 the spelling was deliberately changed from Carmean to Carmine, because the post office kept confusing it with Cameron, up in Milam County. A town changed its own name by one letter to stop its mail going astray.
History
Dr. Primm's Will
Dr. William Primm was born in Stafford County, Virginia in 1778 and bought his first league of Fayette County land from William and Stacy Barton in 1835, for six thousand dollars. He went on buying, and died in 1865 holding more than eight thousand acres in the county. He worked none of it himself, having brought enslaved people up from Louisiana to do that.
Entertainment
Round Top's Rifle Hall
The German inhabitants of Round Top organised a Schuetzen Verein in 1873, a shooting and social club of the kind common in the old country. It bought five and a half acres in 1881 and doubled that nine years later, built a dance hall in 1882, made the grounds the home of the town's long running Fourth of July celebration and called the place Schuetzen Park.
Entertainment
Shakespeare At Winedale
University of Texas undergraduates have been performing Shakespeare in a converted hay barn in rural Fayette County since 1970, and the reason is that an oil heiress looked at the barn and saw the Globe. Ima Hogg had bought the old Lewis place in 1963 and spent the next four years restoring it, using timber cut on the farm itself.
Architecture
The Chapel From La Grange
The chapel standing on this hill was built in La Grange in 1883, sixteen miles away, and served as the sanctuary of the Travis Street Methodist church there. It held a congregation for over a century, was sold in 1994, and was then taken apart and carried here piece by piece between January and April of that year.
Quirky
The Fair That Ate Warrenton
Warrenton is the clearest measure of what an antiques fair did to a stretch of Texas farm road. The village had dwindled to about fifty residents by 1985, the ordinary fate of a crossroads whose cotton and corn and dairying had gone, and and it had twelve antique stores in it. Fifty people, twelve shops.
History
The Fever Year, 1867
The first confirmed death was a man named Sayers, on 27 August 1867. By November yellow fever had killed two hundred and three people in La Grange, out of a town of roughly a thousand. The dead were counted in the categories of the period: a hundred and twelve foreign born, seventy Americans, twenty one Black.
History
The Octagon That Named It
In the mid 1840s a settler named Alwin Soergel built a white house here with an octagonal tower on it, and in a country of plain gabled roofs that tower was landmark enough to name the place. By 1847 the United States post office was listing it as Round Top. The joke is that the tower had eight sides rather than a round one, which nobody seems to have minded.
History
Zadock Woods
Zadock Woods was sixty nine years old the day he died in the Dawson Massacre, the oldest man killed there, and by the account the Texas State Historical Association follows it was his birthday. He had been born in Massachusetts in 1773, fought in the War of 1812 at another Woods' Fort in Missouri under Zachary Taylor, rode with Andrew Jackson at New Orleans, and come to Austin's colony in 1824 as…
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.
