Burton Community

The Handbook of Texas tells Burton's start differently from the plaque. It dates the community to 1862, its post office to 1870, and its incorporation to the fall of 1872, with Nelson Felder as first mayor. By the 1880s there were three churches, a bank, a school and a hotel, and about 150 residents in 1885. The town reached roughly 800 people and thirty businesses by the mid-1940s. In the early 1980s an economist renovated an old cotton gin there as a center for information on ginning, a late use of the trade that had built the town.

What the plaque says

Burton Community John M. Burton (1806-77) of Georgia came to Texas in the 1820s, and to this area in 1834. When the Houston & Texas Central Railroad was being built in 1869, he sold land for townsite. Post office opened Sept. 23, 1870, with Charles Huberich as postmaster. Early businesses included a mercantile store, lumber yard, blacksmith, tin shop, cotton gin, oil mill, drugstore, and leather shop. The noted Texas Ranger Captain L. H. McNelly lived here. After service with State Police, he came home and raised two Ranger units that reflected credit on citizens of the Burton community, 1874-1877. (1976)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Somerville State Park and Trailway — 9.7 mi
  Two park units on an 11,000-acre lake between Austin and College Station, joined by a thirteen-mile trailway for hikers, cyclists and riders with primitive camps along the way.
• Round Top and Festival Hill — 10 mi
  A German village on the old La Bahía Road, named for a house tower, with an 1867 stone church, a Fourth of July kept since 1851 and a concert hall a pianist built without blueprints.
• Independence and Old Baylor Park — 17 mi
  A crossroads north of Brenham that was the richest town in Texas when it won Baylor University in 1845, refused the railroad, and lost the college to Waco and Belton in 1886.
• Texas Wendish Heritage Museum — 24 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.

More markers nearby

• Burton State Bank — steps away
• Union Hill — 1.7 mi
• Leander H. McNelly — 2.5 mi
• Greenvine Baptist Church — 5.2 mi