Lavaca County Courthouse

Hallettsville is named for a woman. Margaret Leatherbury Hallett, born in Virginia in 1787, ran stores with her husband John in Matamoros and Goliad. After he died and the Runaway Scrape passed, she moved onto his league on the Lavaca River, traded hides with Tonkawa people and settlers, ran horses under her own brand and learned some Tonkawa. In 1838 she gave the land for the townsite. When Petersburg contested the county seat after the 1852 election, she is said to have helped get the records moved here and kept; the courts did not finish with the dispute until 1860.

The present courthouse, the fifth for the county, was built in 1897-99 by A. T. Lucas to a design by Eugene T. Heiner. It is Richardsonian Romanesque, cruciform, three stories of raised limestone with a hipped roof and pyramidal towers, and it is described as strongly influenced by H. H. Richardson's Allegheny County Courthouse in Pittsburgh. A restoration supported by the Texas Historical Commission matched its slate roof and tile floors.

Czech and German immigrants filled the town after the 1887 railroad. By 1913 Hallettsville, with about 1,300 people, had thirteen newspapers, in Czech, German and English, and one of them, the Rebel, was the state paper of the Socialist Party of Texas from 1911 to 1917. Margaret Hallett is buried in City Memorial Park.