Site of Early Belton House

Belton began as Nolanville, laid out on the Shelbyville plan with a large courthouse square at its center. According to the Handbook, Col. Henry B. Elliot surveyed the site, E. Lawrence Stickney drew the plat, and the first lots sold on August 26, 1850; the post office opened that October. Tradition says one early saloon was John C. Henry's barrel of whiskey and tin cup under a tree east of the later Main Street bridge. The legislature changed the name to Belton in December 1851, and a small log courthouse and weekly stagecoach service followed in 1852.

What the plaque says

Site of Early Belton House A large building erected here 1850, by Mrs. Sarah Lawler (1807-1890). In this structure, little more than a shed, Mrs. Lawler boarded workmen who were surveying and building Nolanville (later renamed Belton), county seat of newly-created Bell County. Tents, brush arbors, log cabins, and clapboard shanties dotted the landscape; and people moved in before the town was entirely laid out. Mrs. Lawler, born in Tennessee, came to Texas 1837 with husband Eli and their four children. After his death, 1838, she took in boarders, helping to pioneer county development. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum — 7.4 mi
  The Santa Fe depot of 1911 in a railroad town that began in 1880 as a construction camp, now a museum with locomotives and cars parked beside the active rail yard.
• Mother Neff State Park — 19 mi
  A Leon River park that grew from six acres Isabella Neff left the state in her 1921 will, where Civilian Conservation Corps Company 817 built a stone tower, a pavilion and roads in the 1930s.

More markers nearby

• Cochran, Blair and Potts Department Store — steps away
• Peter Hansbrough Bell — steps away
• Bell County Courthouses — steps away
• William Whitaker Reed — 0.2 mi