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Impact of Railroads: Stories from Washington, Lee, and Montgomery Counties

by Robin Montgomery

Washington-on-the-Brazos

Nourishing its glorious past as capital of first Washington Municipality and then of Washington County,
Washington-on-the-Brazos flourished until the mid-1850s. Even though there was a major flood in 1854, river traffic was robust. Then came the fatal decision to forego the arrival of the railroad. In 1858, the citizens refused to pay an $11,000 bonus to the Houston and Texas Central Railway which was building through the area at the time. 

This omission paved the way for the rise of two cities on either side of the Brazos and east and west, respectively, of Washington. On the east, across the Brazos in Grimes County, was Navasota which
accepted the railroad. Then in 1860 in Washington County, the Washington County Railway built into Brenham to Washington’s west sealing Brenham’s destiny to replace Washington as the hub of the county. Even building a sizeable bridge across the Brazos near it failed to halt the decline of Washington-on-the-Brazos. 

However, Washington still holds a prominent place in the cultural history of the Trans-Brazos Region and for the whole state of Texas. At the museum and research center are numerous reminders, festivals, artifacts, preserved buildings, et al, which serve to remind us all of the great gallantry in the birthing and early history of Texas.
                                             
The Town of Independence
 Like Washington-on-the-Brazos, independence was blessed with a glorious role in early Texas. But the fathers of this “Athens-of-Texas” likewise refused to grant a right-of-way to a railroad, in their case, the Santa Fe.  By the 1880s, most of the railway lines in the area had bypassed Independence. Therefore, much of the trade was going to competing towns.

The resultant difficulty of travel for students would eventually cause Independence to lose its two centers of higher education and consequently its cultural centers of gravity. In the middle 1880s, officials decided to move Baylor Female College to Belton where it assumed the name of Mary Hardin Baylor while Baylor University moved to Waco.

Lee County
The coming of the railroad determined the location of the county seat in Lee County. The town of Lexington dates to 1837 when James Shaw rode into the area seeking a favorable grant of land as reward for his services to the Republic of Texas. Other setters soon followed. In 1848, Shaw became postmaster of the community which originally took the name of String Prairie. It was two years later that the community assumed the name of Lexington after the town of that name in Massachusetts. In 1869, twenty-one families from Mississippi moved into the area by way of a wagon train.

In the spite of the historic background of Lexington the new town of Giddings, founded only in 1871, won the political battle to become the county seat of the newly created county in 1874. The reason: Giddings was founded on a railroad site. The Houston and Texas Central ran through the town. As a consolation prize, Lexington did eventually receive a railroad. In 1890, the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway arrived at the town. However, the same railway went through Giddings.

Montgomery County Politics
Conroe’s emergence as the county seat of MontgomeryCounty marked the final installment of a three-act drama centered on the coming of the railroads.
             
Our story begins in the year 1837. That was the year that MontgomeryCounty became the third county created under the authority of the Republic of Texas. Shortly after this event, the town of Montgomery
became the county seat. Two of the earliest and most respected citizens of the town were the brothers, Peter and Richard Willis. The brothers found wives and settled into a lucrative mercantile business. As time went on, they began searching for adventure beyond the bounds of their beloved Montgomery. Their search led them to purchase a block of land to the east known as Mockingbird Hill. This purchase set the stage for our three-part drama. 
              
Act one of the drama came after the Willis brothers donated Mockingbird Hill to the International and Great Northern Railroad. When the railroad extended through the site it quickly became the location of the town of
Willis. Willis emerged in 1872. Just two years later, the town which the Willis brothers helped spawn issued a challenge to unseat Montgomeryas the county seat. In the resultant election, the vote was 788 to 646 in favor of Willis. Since this was short of the two-thirds margin needed to declare victory, the next six years were spent in a matrix of confusion over which city was actually in charge of the county’s political business.
             
In 1880, act two of the railroad drama decided the issue when the Houston and Texas Central completed a branch line from Navasota to Montgomery. In an election that year Montgomery received 1308 votes to Willis’s 1243 confirming the former as the county seat.
             
The impact of the railroad industry on MontgomeryCounty politics was not to end there, however, for act three was soon to follow. In 1881, Isaac Conroe moved the headquarters of his sawmill operation some two miles to the west of his previous location on StewartCreek, a move which placed him strategically close to the International and Great Northern line that ran north and south.  By the mid-eighties near the site was placed a post office under the name of Conroe Switch. Shortly thereafter, intersecting the site from the west was the Gulf, Colorado and the Santa Fe Rail line. Evidencing the political clout resulting from this turn of events, in 1889 Conroe Switch, by then known simply as Conroe, won the right to become the county seat in place of Montgomery by sixty-two votes.
             
Thus did the curtain fall on our three-act drama.

Thank you.


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