The Community of Briggs

The Handbook of Texas fills in the town's makers. Stephen Taylor, who came from Tennessee about 1880, bought the townsite land from W. T. Gann, built a gin and then the area's first general store. It was Dr. William Hazelwood, a local physician, who carried the petition to rename the post office for his mother-in-law. Two gins ran when cotton was king, a bank was chartered in 1909 and a high school organized in 1915. Briggs reached its peak in 1936, with 520 people and twenty businesses. Its school joined the Burnet district in 1969.

What the plaque says

The Community of Briggs Pioneers mainly from the Old South settled here on the Aaron Boyce land grant in the 1860s and 70s. They had a school, and held church services, at Gum Springs in the 1880s. In 1888 a post office opened at Taylor's Gin Store; this was renamed in 1898 for Mrs. Henry D. Briggs, an early settler. On April 12, 1906, a tornado destroyed much of the village. Afterward Briggs was rebuilt on a platted townsite; it thrived from 1906 to 1920, but began declining after a 1928 fire. Many of the townspeople have worked since 1950 at Fort Hood, in neighboring Bell County. (1977)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hancock Springs Park — 19 mi
  Lampasas's city park on Sulphur Creek, with a spring-fed swimming pool that holds about 69 degrees all year, the walls of the old bathhouse and a golf course.
• Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Refuge: Doeskin Ranch — 21 mi
  A free federal refuge north of Lake Travis kept for two songbirds that need old juniper and oak, with trails at the Doeskin Ranch unit near Bertram.
• Inks Lake State Park — 28 mi
  A state park on a constant-level lake of the Colorado, between Buchanan and Inks dams, with pink granite and gneiss at the water and CCC work along Park Road 4.
• Longhorn Cavern State Park — 29 mi
  A cave carved by an underground river in the Hill Country, cleared of mud by hand in the 1930s and reached down 52 stone steps on a guided tour.

More markers nearby

• Prairie View Cemetery — 2.1 mi
• Mahomet-Sycamore Springs Community — 4.7 mi
• Mount Horeb Lodge — 4.8 mi
• Mahomet Cemetery — 5.0 mi