Union Hill

Dr. Gantt named the place in 1841 for its hill and for the absence of quarrels among its settlers. By 1860 it counted seven merchants, four doctors, two lawyers and two ministers on the wagon road between Houston and Austin. In 1858 the legislature chartered Union Hill High School, one of the first Texas schools to carry that title. The post office closed in September 1868. When the railroad reached Burton in 1870, the church, school and drugstore were carried two miles to the new town, and by the 1980s only a deep well remained.

What the plaque says

Union Hill The Hugh and Lucy Kerr family from Tennessee started the Kerr settlement in this area in 1831. W. B. McClellan (1804-80) from North Carolina bought land from W. P. Kerr in 1844 and began a second settlement. Union Academy was operating by 1850. Union Hill Post Office opened in 1854. Mrs. Lucy Kerr gave acreage at this point for a Methodist church; Masonic lodge and school soon shared the site. Stores, a hotel, and other buildings stood to the west. Unincorporated, the town of 800 dwindled after 1870, as railroad facilities in Burton (2 mi. south) drew away the local businesses. (1976)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Somerville State Park and Trailway — 8.1 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.
• Round Top and Festival Hill — 11 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.
• Independence and Old Baylor Park — 17 mi
  A crossroads north of Brenham that was the richest town in Texas when it won Baylor University in 1845, refused the railroad, and lost the college to Waco and Belton in 1886.
• Texas Wendish Heritage Museum — 23 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.

More markers nearby

• Burton Community — 1.7 mi
• Burton State Bank — 1.7 mi
• Leander H. McNelly — 2.3 mi
• Gideon Lincecum — 5.4 mi