Belle Plain

Belle Plain was planned from the start. Nelson M. Smith bought state school land for the site in 1875 and laid out wide streets and a business district. The name may come from Katie Belle Magee, the first child born at the townsite. By summer 1876 the town had three businesses, one of them J. W. Cheatham's saloon. As county seat it gained stores and saloons, a stone jail, two lodges, eleven lawyers and four physicians, and from 1879 a newspaper, the Callahan County Clarendon. About 400 people lived here in 1884.

What the plaque says

First official county seat of Callahan County, 1877-1883. The first unofficial county seat was Callahan City where the commissioners court was organized, July 30, 1877, and several civil and probate cases filed by an invalid election, October 13th, and a valid election, December 9, 1877 Belle Plain was selected. On January 16, 1883, the county seat was located at Baird.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Conrad Hilton Center and Mobley Hotel — 23 mi
  The 40-room oil-boom hotel in Cisco that Conrad Hilton bought in 1919 when a bank deal fell through, now a museum of the Hilton start and of Cisco's 1927 Santa Claus bank robbery.
• Frontier Texas! — 23 mi
  Abilene's multimedia museum of the frontier as the settlers told it, beside the Texas and Pacific tracks the town was built on, and the official visitor center for the Texas Forts Trail.
• Fort Phantom Hill — 29 mi
  A field of lone stone chimneys north of Abilene, left by the fire after the Army left in 1854, later a stage stop and a buffalo-hide town of more than 500 people.

More markers nearby

• Site of Belle Plain College — steps away
• William Jeff Maltby — 1.7 mi
• Belle Plaine Cemetery — 1.7 mi
• Admiral Baptist Church — 4.0 mi