The Railroad Bonus

Washington-on-the-Brazos was the county's first town, grown up at a ferry crossing on the Brazos in the 1820s and a real commercial centre by the mid 1830s. It is known as the place where the Texas Declaration of Independence was adopted on 2 March 1836 and signed the day after. Less often told is how it died, and it died of a decision its own citizens made. In 1858 the Houston and Texas Central Railway asked the town for a bonus of eleven thousand dollars to bring the line through. Washington refused. River trade was what had made the town, and its merchants reckoned steamboats on the Brazos would go on making it. The railroad went to Navasota instead, in 1859. A feeder line off that same main line, the Washington County Rail Road, reached the east bank of the Brazos in 1860 and Brenham in April 1861. The county seat had already gone, to Mount Vernon in 1841 and on to Brenham in 1844, so the loss of the railroad removed one of the last arguments for the place. Within a generation the river traffic was gone and Washington was a scatter of buildings on a bluff above a river nobody shipped on any more. By the end of the century it had effectively ceased to be a town at all, which is why the state historic site there had to be assembled out of a park rather than preserved out of a survivor. The refusal is frequently merged with a second one, a generation later and a dozen miles west, where Independence declined to give right of way to the Santa Fe. Two different towns, two different railroads, and the two are often told as one story. Washington's was a cash bonus in 1858. Independence's was land.