Transport
Bastrop's Old Iron Bridge
Bastrop voted to tax itself for this bridge. In 1921, with motor cars replacing wagons faster than the county could keep up, residents approved a tax increase and the county issued road bonds, and the result opened in January 1924 at a cost of 167,500 dollars.
Nature
Four Landscapes Meet
This 1,140 acre park on the highway east of Austin sits directly on a seam in the map. Four distinct Texas ecosystems meet inside its boundaries: the Post Oak Savannah, the Blackland Prairie, an outlying finger of the East Texas piney woods, and the riparian corridor of the Colorado River itself.
Entertainment & Sports
Hope Floats House
At the corner of East Eighth and Olive in Smithville stands the house Sandra Bullock's character came home to in Hope Floats, the 1998 film that put this town on the map and eventually onto the sign at its edge. It is the McCollum Chapman Trousdale House, built in 1908 in a Neoclassical style for J. H.
Quirky
Ms. Pearl the Giant Squirrel
A fourteen foot squirrel stands beside Highway 71 at Cedar Creek holding a pecan, and she is there for an entirely straightforward commercial reason. The Berdoll family grew pecans and made pies, and needed drivers on a fast highway to actually stop rather than register the sign and keep going. The proposal, as the family tells it, was that people could not drive past a giant squirrel.
History
Railroad Town, Film Town
Smithville is the size it is because of a repair shop. The Taylor, Bastrop and Houston Railroad came through in 1886, the Missouri, Kansas and Texas took the line over in 1891, and in 1894 the Katy built a large locomotive repair shop here and made the town a division point, which meant crews changed here, engines were serviced here, and hundreds of skilled men needed housing here.
Quirky
Smitty the Gingerbread Man
On the second of December, 2006, at the sixteenth annual Festival of Lights, Smithville baked a gingerbread man weighing 1,308 pounds and eight ounces and measuring twenty feet from head to toe. It took 750 pounds of flour, 49 gallons of molasses and 72 dozen eggs, and it was baked outdoors over a dump truck load of charcoal, because no oven in the county was remotely large enough.
Entertainment & Sports
The Bastrop Opera House
Two merchants, P. Otto Elzner and S. D. Green, put this up in 1889 for about fifteen thousand dollars, building it behind Elzner's store on the site of an old stable and copying the design of the opera house at Taylor rather than paying an architect for a new one.
Architecture
The CCC Cabins
Fifteen stone cabins here were built by hand in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps, and they are still rented out by the night, which means anyone can sleep in one for the price of a motel room.
Nature
The Lost Pines
The pines along this stretch of road have no business being here. The Lost Pines are a stand of loblolly pine covering more than 75,000 acres across parts of five counties, cut off by about a hundred miles of prairie and post oak from the main East Texas pine belt.
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.
