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. The effect on the population was immediate and dramatic: 616 residents in 1890, an estimated 2,500 by 1896, and by 1909 the largest town in Bastrop County. That is why a place of under four thousand people today has the street grid, the shopfronts and the substantial houses of somewhere considerably larger. The shops themselves closed long ago, and the town has been living off the shape they left behind ever since. That inheritance is also why the film crews keep coming back. The town has an intact early twentieth century main street and residential blocks with almost no modern intrusion in them, which is enormously expensive to build and nearly impossible to fake convincingly. Hope Floats was shot here in 1997, The Tree of Life in the late 2000s, and Bernie after that, with a steady traffic of smaller productions in between. Inside the post office there is a mural called The Law, Texas Rangers, painted by Minette Teichmueller in 1939 under the federal art programme that put a painting into hundreds of small town post offices. It is worth a detour of one block.