Stafford Opera House

Columbus began as Beeson's Ferry, where members of Austin's Old Three Hundred settled on a horseshoe bend of the Colorado from late 1821. Austin laid out a town here before choosing the Brazos for his capital. Sam Houston camped across the river from March 19 to 26, 1836, during the Runaway Scrape, and had the town burned when he left. In 1837 Judge Robert McAlpin Williamson, Three-Legged Willie, held the county's first district court under an oak near the present courthouse.

Robert E. Stafford, a cattleman, built his bank and opera house in 1886 to a Second Empire design attributed to Nicholas J. Clayton of Galveston: handmade brick in two colors, a bank and dry goods store below, a flat-floored hall above for 600 with 400 more in the balcony, and a steer head and lariat on the cornerstone. Lillian Russell opened it; Harry Houdini played it; no opera is known to have been performed. On July 7, 1890, after the cornerstone ceremony for the new courthouse, city marshal Larkin Hope and his brother Marion shot and killed Stafford and his brother John, a killing in the Stafford-Townsend feud that ran from 1871 to 1911.

The building later held a Ford dealership and a skating rink, and preservationists bought it in 1972 and rededicated it in 1990. Columbus's violence did not end with the feud: on November 12, 1935, a mob took two Black teenagers, Bennie Mitchell Jr. and Ernest Collins, from custody and hanged them.