Town of Lexington

The town Shaw started kept changing after the railroad revived it. The String Prairie settlement took the name Lexington in 1850, and in 1869 twenty-one families came by wagon train from Mississippi. R. M. Dickson's general store of 1860 lasted into the 1930s, and a building he put up in 1892 was still a grocery in 1989. Lexington incorporated in 1917 and by 1927 had about 1,000 people and a bank. The Handbook counts weekly livestock auctions there since 1938, and in 1976 two log cabins from about 1850 became the Pioneer Village Museum near the square.

What the plaque says

Town of Lexington Settled in 1837 in area then part of Burleson County; named for Massachusetts town where the American Revolution began. First inhabitants of the area were Tonkawa Indians. The first white settler was James Shaw (1808-1879), a young surveyor and teacher from Ohio. He received a land grant for service in 1836 in the Battle of San Jacinto. He settled here, 1837, and set up first post office at nearby String Prairie community, 1849. Although early cotton industry declined, the town revived, 1890, when San Antonio & Aransas Pass Railroad reached here. (1969)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Somerville State Park and Trailway — 20 mi
  Two park units on an 11,000-acre lake between Austin and College Station, joined by a thirteen-mile trailway for hikers, cyclists and riders with primitive camps along the way.
• Texas Wendish Heritage Museum — 21 mi
  A museum at Serbin of the Wends, a Slavic people from Lusatia whose congregation of nearly 600 crossed on the Ben Nevis in 1854, losing seventy-three to cholera on the way.
• Bastrop State Park — 27 mi
  The westernmost loblolly pines in the United States, cut off from the East Texas forest by a hundred miles of post oak, burned almost entirely in 2011 and growing back.
• Round Top and Festival Hill — 31 mi
  A German village on the old La Bahía Road, named for a house tower, with an 1867 stone church, a Fourth of July kept since 1851 and a concert hall a pianist built without blueprints.

More markers nearby

• Lexington Masonic Lodge No. 138 — steps away
• United Methodist Church of Lexington — steps away
• The First Baptist Church of Lexington — steps away
• Lexington Schools — 0.3 mi