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. The Townsend family had arrived from Florida in 1826 and founded a Presbyterian chapel and a Masonic lodge, Germans came in through the 1840s, and by 1850 there were a hundred and fifty people, two stores, two blacksmith shops and two taverns. The town incorporated in 1870 and then shrank for most of a century. The Handbook of Texas puts the peak at three hundred and sixty in 1900, though the census that year counted a hundred and sixty nine and its own high mark was two hundred and thirty eight in 1890. It was down to a hundred and fifty by 1925 and has been under a hundred since 1970: eighty seven at the 2020 census. One claim about the place gets repeated everywhere and is not true. Round Top is often called the smallest incorporated town in Texas, and it is not close. Twenty one Texas municipalities were smaller at the 2020 census, and fourteen of those are called towns. The smallest of all is Mustang, in Navarro County, which recorded a population of zero. It was incorporated in 1973 so that alcohol could be sold there in a dry county, and Mark Cuban bought the whole town in December 2021 for about two million dollars. The Handbook of Texas puts Round Top correctly and carefully: one of the smallest incorporated communities in the state.