Fayette County
La Grange, Fayette County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Formed from Colorado and Bastrop counties. Created December 14, 1837. Organized January 1, 1838. Named in honor of Marquis de LaFayette. 1757-1834. Nobleman and republican friend of Washington and of the United States. County Seat, La Grange.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Carved from Colorado and Bastrop counties, Fayette County was created in December 1837 and organized the following January, in the earliest days of the Republic of Texas. It bears the name of the Marquis de Lafayette, the French nobleman whose devotion to the American cause made him a symbol of republican friendship. La Grange was chosen as the county seat.
Why it matters
The county's founding and its choice of namesake show how the young Republic of Texas consciously wrote itself into the revolutionary ideals of the United States it hoped to join.
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Related people
- · Marquis de Lafayette
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1867
La Grange, TX
Yellow fever haunted nineteenth-century Texas, its mosquito-borne cause unknown and its course—from fever to jaundice to death—often swift and merciless. When the disease reached La Grange in August 1867, terrified citizens fled, homes were quarantined under the sign of "Yellow Jack," and the town fell nearly silent. Striking rich and poor alike, it claimed doctors, the district judge, the sheriff, and clerks, killing an estimated two hundred people—fifteen to twenty percent of the population—many now lying in mass graves in the old city cemetery.
W. S. Robson
La Grange, TX
William Sion Robson came to Texas as an infant with his Georgia-born parents in 1852, settling first near Round Top before the family moved to La Grange in 1863. He rose from butcher to public servant, holding offices from tax assessor to deputy district clerk, and in 1880 he and his wife Lucy built the first section of this home. Robson became a lawyer and served three terms as Fayette County Judge beginning in 1890, and was a charter member of the Texas Bar Association.
Bradshaw-Killough House
La Grange, TX
Built in 1886 for La Grange merchant Amzi T. Bradshaw and his wife Sarah, this frame house passed in 1908 to their daughter Nellie and her husband John Killough. In 1924 the Killoughs gave the Victorian home a fashionable makeover, adding a crenelated Tudor Revival entry portico and a side porte cochère. Its two-story bay window and corbelled chimneys still hint at the residence's original nineteenth-century lines.
Fayette County Jail
La Grange, TX
When the Republic of Texas carved out Fayette County in 1837, the young town of La Grange became its seat of government, and a jail followed within a year. The stone building that stands today dates to 1883, raised after an arsonist destroyed its predecessor, with rock hauled from Buckner's Creek and Muldoon sandstone shaped into a solid, Victorian Gothic form. For more than a century it held prisoners and housed the sheriff's family before finding new life serving the community.