History
Alleyton and the Cotton Road
The railroad reached Alleyton in 1860 and then stopped, which left this small place as the westernmost railhead in Texas at exactly the wrong moment in history. When the Union blockaded the Texas coast during the Civil War, cotton could no longer leave through Galveston, and cotton was very nearly the only thing the Confederacy had to sell.
History
Beason's Crossing
Benjamin Beason ran a ferry across the Colorado here, and for one week in March 1836 his crossing was the pivot of the Texas Revolution. Sam Houston brought his army to the east bank on the nineteenth and made camp.
Architecture
The Cattle Baron's Opera House
Robert E. Stafford ran cattle and money in Colorado County, and in 1886 he spent fifty thousand dollars on a building on Spring Street, then another ten thousand on the curtain, the wings and the stage machinery. He hired Nicholas J. Clayton, the Galveston architect responsible for the Bishop's Palace, to design it. The ground floor held Stafford's own bank and a dry goods store.
History
The Court Oak
There is a tree stump in the middle of Travis Street beside the Colorado County courthouse, and the roadway was built around it on purpose. In April 1837 the first term of the district court under the Republic of Texas convened on this spot, under the branches of the live oak that stood here, because there was no building in town suitable for holding court in.
Museums & Art
The Santa Claus Museum
A woman named Mary Elizabeth Youens Hopkins was given a Santa Claus figure in 1913, when she was six months old. Her parents noticed that she would play with nothing else and kept giving her Santas, and she went on collecting them for the next seventy seven years, stopping only when she died in 1990.
History
The Tower That Would Not Fall
Columbus built this brick tower in 1883 to carry the tank that supplied water for fighting downtown fires. It took four hundred thousand bricks and the walls are three feet thick at the base, which was a reasonable specification for holding many tons of water in the air above a wooden town.
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.
