Lost Pines of Texas

The commercial life of these woods began in 1838, when the Bastrop Steam Mill Company started cutting pine, and in 1840 Jacob Higgins and Abner Cook opened Higgins Mill. As Bastrop County's population passed 11,000 by 1870, demand for timber grew, and the heaviest logging came around 1880. Land for Bastrop and Buescher state parks was bought from private owners between 1933 and 1937, and the pines inside them have been spared logging ever since.

What the plaque says

Lost Pines of Texas Located 80 miles west of the main pine belt of Texas, these trees probably were once part of vast, prehistoric pine forests. As land areas gradually rose, possibly due to glacier activity, most of the forests moved east. Ideal local conditions have kept the Lost Pines intact. One of the first records of the trees was made in 1807 by Zebulon Pike, explorer for whom Pike's Peak was named. In the 19th century, these loblolly pines supported the county's main industry. Local lumber was shipped by riverboat and ox-wagon to points all over Texas. (1969)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bastrop State Park — 0.4 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 — 28 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

• The Gotier Trace — steps away
• Early History of the City of Bastrop — steps away
• Bastrop County — steps away
• Felipe Enrique Neri Baron de Bastrop — 0.6 mi