Site of Old Lexington Village

Lexington was a voting place before it was a town. The Handbook of Texas says the county's first election took place there on May 14, 1853, at Jack's Branch, a spot it now places at Union Bluff. Voters chose J. H. Dyer as county judge, Charley Davis as sheriff, C. N. Brooks as clerk and justice of the peace, and Thomas Steiner as a commissioner. In August the commissioners accepted a 260-acre donation for a seat at Hillsborough. Brooks, the clerk Lexington had elected, then built that town's first courthouse: twelve feet square, elm poles around a dirt floor.

What the plaque says

Site of Old Lexington Village (1 mile South) Founded about 1851 on Jack's Branch. Was Hill County's first settlement and only polling place when county organized on May 14, 1853. For 4 months two log homes functioned as a courthouse until a special election put the county seat at Hillsboro. Supplemental plate: Marker originally located 4 miles west on SH 22 at Jack's Branch. Relocated to Hill County Courthouse Square 2006 by Hill County Sesquicentennial Committee. (1964)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hill County Courthouse — steps away
  Wesley C. Dodson's limestone Second Empire courthouse of 1890 on the Hillsboro square, gutted by fire on New Year's Day 1993 and rededicated in 1999 after a rebuilding that two Willie Nelson concerts helped pay for.
• Cleburne State Park — 30 mi
  A 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps park on the old Chisholm Trail crossing country, with a spring-fed lake, a hand-carved three-tiered spillway and a CCC bridge in Johnson County.
• Bosque Museum — 31 mi
  A Clifton museum holding what it calls the largest repository of Norwegian artifacts in the South and Southwest, with Bosque County finds some 10,000 years old and a log cabin built by the Olson family.

More markers nearby

• Bragg Williams Lynching — steps away
• Hill County — steps away
• City of Hillsboro — steps away
• James L. Harris — steps away