Bastrop County

The county's antebellum wealth rested on cotton and slavery. Enslaved people and cotton both arrived in 1837, and in 1838 the Bastrop Steam Mill Company began cutting the Lost Pines, supplying lumber to Austin, San Antonio and Houston. In 1850 the county had 2,180 people, 919 of them enslaved; by 1860 it had 7,006, with 2,248 enslaved and 700 born abroad. Even so, Bastrop County voted 352 to 335 against secession in 1861, then armed and equipped companies for the Confederacy.

What the plaque says

Bastrop County A part of Austin's grant in 1821; created the municipality of Mina, 1834; became the County of Mina in the Republic of Texas, 1836. Name changed to "Bastrop," December 18, 1837, in honor of Felipe Enrique Neri, Baron de Bastrop, 1770-1829, land commissioner of Austin's Colony. Member of the Congress of Coahuila and Texas. Bastrop, the County Seat

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bastrop State Park — 0.5 mi
  The westernmost loblolly pines in the United States, cut off from the East Texas forest by a hundred miles of post oak, burned almost entirely in 2011 and growing back.
• Texas Wendish Heritage Museum — 18 mi
  A museum at Serbin of the Wends, a Slavic people from Lusatia whose congregation of nearly 600 crossed on the Ben Nevis in 1854, losing seventy-three to cholera on the way.
• McKinney Falls State Park — 26 mi
  Limestone falls on Onion Creek inside Austin, where people camped under a rock overhang for thousands of years and a financier of the Texas Revolution built his stone ranch house.
• Lockhart Courthouse Square — 27 mi
  A cotton-era courthouse town named the Barbecue Capital of Texas, built near the 1840 Plum Creek fight that followed the killing of Comanche leaders at peace talks.

More markers nearby

• Early History of the City of Bastrop — steps away
• Lost Pines of Texas — steps away
• The Gotier Trace — steps away
• Governor J. D. Sayers — 0.7 mi