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Moving - Bastrop, Texas

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We’ve included here a brief history of Bastrop, TX.

A Brief History of Bastrop, Texas

Bastrop, county seat of Bastrop County, is located in the center of the county, about thirty miles southeast of downtown Austin. The town is at the junction of State highways 71, 21, and 95, and on the Colorado River and the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad. The site was first occupied in 1804, when a fort was established at the strategic Colorado River crossing of the Old San Antonio Roadqv and named Puesta del Colorado. The Baron de Bastropqv obtained permission from the Spanish to found a German colony and selected the site in 1823, but subsequently failed to establish a settlement. The town was probably named Bastrop by Stephen F. Austinqv in honor of the baron, a longtime friend and coworker. Austin, interested in developing the upper reaches of his original colony, used this name after the German colonization attempt failed and he obtained permission in 1827 to locate a "Little Colony" of 100 families on the site. He had seen the future townsite on his first journey to Texas, and had noted it favorably in his journal. By 1830 such pioneers as Josiah Wilbarger, Reuben Hornsby, James Burleson, Edward Burleson,qqv and Jess Barker had located in the Bastrop area. But the Indian depredations that had doomed the German colonization attempt continued to slow settlement. In 1830 a traveler wrote that the population of Bastrop consisted of a bachelor and two families, with John F. Webberqv and the Wilbarger family living a short distance to the north.

On June 8, 1832, land commissioner José Miguel de Arciniega^qv officially platted the town along conventional Mexican lines, with a square in the center and blocks set aside for public buildings. He also officially named the site Bastrop, but two years later the Coahuila and Texas^qv legislature renamed it Mina^qv, in honor of Francisco Xavier Mina,qv a Mexican martyr and hero.

On January 1, 1835, Juan N. Almonte^qv reported a population of 1,100 in the area, and at the outbreak of the Texas Revolutionqv the town's population was approximately 400. Bastrop served as a business, commercial, and political center for an area that stretched far beyond Bastrop County; it was the place where settlers rallied for retaliation and forted up for protection when Indian depredations occurred in the vicinity. Until the railroad reached the county in the early 1870s, Bastrop was the only town in the county. In May 1835, Mina citizens became the first to organize a committee of safety to stockpile arms and keep citizens informed of revolutionary developments. The town suffered in the Runaway Scrapeqv of 1836, when residents returned to find it completely destroyed by the Mexican army and Indians. Indians, particularly the Comanches, who hunted in the area every fall, continued to provide a major threat until after annexation^qv to the United States in 1846.

The town was incorporated under the laws of Texas on December 18, 1837, and the name changed back to Bastrop. The community then comprised a courthouse, a hotel, a stockade, a gunsmith shop, a general store, and a number of residences. With farming, the timber industry provided a mainstay for the local economy from 1836 to 1860. The Lost Pine Forest,qv the westernmost stand of the eastern pine forest and the only timber available in what was then western Texas, contributed to the economy. In 1839, when Austin became the capital of the republic, Bastrop began supplying the city with lumber. Soon, ox teams were carting Bastrop lumber to San Antonio, along the western frontier, and into Mexico

ICC MC 414146
DOT 981371