The First U. S. Postal Rural Mail Route in Texas

La Grange's route came less than three years after the national experiment began. Rural free delivery started on October 1, 1896, with routes out of Charles Town, Halltown and Uvilla, West Virginia, paid for by appropriations that began with Tom Watson's 1893 bill for $10,000. Farm families asked for routes by petition, more than 10,000 of them during the experimental years, and a route required passable roads, so the service pushed counties to improve theirs. Carriers supplied their own horses and wagons. Rural delivery became permanent on July 1, 1902, and the word free was dropped in 1906.

What the plaque says

The First U. S. Postal Rural Mail Route in Texas Authorized effective August 1, 1899. La Grange, Fayette County. Erected by the State of Texas 1936

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Monument Hill and Kreische Brewery State Historic Sites — 1.2 mi
  A shared tomb on the Colorado River bluff for the men of the Dawson fight and the black bean lottery, beside the ruins of a German stonemason's spring-fed brewery.
• St. John the Baptist Catholic Church (Ammannsville) — 8.4 mi
  A wooden Carpenter Gothic church built in 1919 after storm and fire took two before it, its dusty-rose interior painted by an artist whose name was lost for decades.
• Saints Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church (Dubina) — 12 mi
  The church of Texas's first Czech settlement, under a sky-blue painted ceiling that was whitewashed in the 1950s and brought back from faint traces by its own parishioners.
• Nativity of Mary, Blessed Virgin Catholic Church (High Hill) — 13 mi
  A red brick Gothic Revival church of 1906 in a German farm settlement, where two San Antonio painters spent 1912 faking marble columns and stone vaults on wood.

More markers nearby

• Birthplace of the SPJST — steps away
• Site of a Twin Blockhouse — steps away
• W. S. Robson — 0.2 mi
• Fayette County — 0.6 mi