Hallettsville

Hallettsville first incorporated on August 13, 1870, and surrendered its charter by 1875, when it had an estimated 600 people. It incorporated again on June 29, 1888, a year after the San Antonio and Aransas Pass came through, and counted about 1,700 residents by 1890. By 1892 the town owned an electric plant and a waterworks supplied by artesian wells. After the Civil War a Freedmen's Bureau agent and federal troops were stationed here, and when White leaders regained control of county affairs in the 1870s they moved quickly to disfranchise Black residents.

What the plaque says

Hallettsville Founded 1833 when John Hallett erected a log cabin near Lavaca River. Town was named for his widow, Margaret, who gave the land when town became county seat in 1852. Farming, livestock, poultry processing, and cotton marketing center. State Championship High School Rodeo held annually in June. 1968

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lavaca County Courthouse — steps away
  A limestone Romanesque courthouse of 1897-99 on the square of a town founded by a widow trader, in a county seat that once printed the Socialist Party's state paper.
• Spoetzl Brewery — 14 mi
  The brewery a Czech and German railroad town started in a tin shed in 1909, run through Prohibition by a Bavarian who had brewed in Cairo, and then by his daughter.
• St. Mary's Church of the Assumption (Praha) — 17 mi
  The mother parish of the Czech settlements around Flatonia, a stone-fronted church of 1895 whose ceiling Gottfried Flury turned into a turquoise garden, with an August 15 feast since 1855.
• Nativity of Mary, Blessed Virgin Catholic Church (High Hill) — 19 mi
  A red brick Gothic Revival church of 1906 in a German farm settlement, where two San Antonio painters spent 1912 faking marble columns and stone vaults on wood.

More markers nearby

• First National Bank of Hallettsville — steps away
• 50th Anniversary of Battle of Galveston — steps away
• Sacred Heart Catholic Church — steps away
• General John W. Whitfield — 0.3 mi