Pittsville

The 1860 census counted about 240 people at Pittsville. Most farmed or raised stock, but there were also wagoners, carpenters, schoolteachers, a brick mason, an engineer, a minister, a physician, a wheelwright, a machinist and an artesian-well borer. Over the years the town had several general stores, a blacksmith shop, a millinery shop, a photo studio and a two-story school or academy. Lucy Upton kept the post office from 1870; it closed in 1889 as people moved to Fulshear and the railroad. The last residents, Alice Nesbitt and her daughter Doris, left in 1947.

What the plaque says

Pittsville Planters preferring the prairie to the hazardous Brazos River bottoms settled this village in the 1840s. Named for store owners A. R. and Amanda (Wade) Pitts, it was a major commercial center by 1860. During the Civil War, the Pittsville Home Guard and Confederate cavalry units, which helped recapture Galveston, camped in the area. Notable residents included Robert Locke Harris and A. A. Laurence, Confederate surgeons; William Sheriff and J. Wesson Parker, Texas legislators and Fort Bend County judges; and John Huggins, innovator of horseracing techniques. The arrival of a new railroad to the south in 1888, and the subsequent founding of Fulshear, resulted in the gradual decline and eventual disappearance of Pittsville by the late 1940s. (2010)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Brazos Bend State Park — 31 mi
  Oak and pecan bottomland, lakes and alligators on the Brazos River 45 miles from downtown Houston, with the museum's George Observatory in the woods.

More markers nearby

• Fulshear Cemetery — 1.9 mi
• Town of Fulshear — 2.8 mi
• Randon & Pennington Grant of 1824 — 6.2 mi
• John Foster Land Grant — 6.8 mi