Milam County Courthouse
Cameron, Milam County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This is the fourth structure to serve as the Milam County Courthouse. The local Masonic Lodge laid the cornerstone for the building on July 4, 1891. Designed by architect A. O. Watson of Austin, the courthouse at one time featured a Second Empire style roof and a cupola with a four-sided clock. The clock was removed and the roof altered in a 1938 renovation project by the Federal Works Progress Administration. As the center of county government for over a century, the courthouse stands as a significant part of Milam County history.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The fourth building to serve as Milam County's seat of justice, this courthouse rose in 1891 with its cornerstone laid by the local Masonic lodge on Independence Day. Designed by Austin architect A.O. Watson, it once wore a fashionable Second Empire roof and a four-faced clock cupola, both lost when the Works Progress Administration remodeled the building in 1938. For more than a century it has stood at the center of county government in Cameron.
Why it matters
County courthouses were the proudest civic buildings of Gilded Age Texas, and the WPA's Depression-era remaking of this one shows how New Deal public works reshaped even the architecture of local government.
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Related people
- · A.O. Watson
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Ben Milam
Cameron, TX
Kentucky-born Benjamin Rush Milam fought in the War of 1812, traded with the Comanche, and became an empresario recruiting settlers to Mexican Texas before joining the fight for independence. In late 1835 he rallied hesitant Texian volunteers with the cry 'Who will follow Old Ben Milam into San Antonio?' and led the assault that took the town—though he was killed by a sniper on December 7 before it fell. The State of Texas raised this monument in 1936 for the independence centennial.
Milam County
Cameron, TX
Carved from Robertson's colony and the Mexican municipality of Viesca, this land was renamed Milam County in December 1835 to honor Benjamin Rush Milam, killed leading Texian forces at San Antonio. Once a sprawling district, it was whittled down as Burleson, Robertson, Williamson, Bell, McLennan, and Falls counties were cut from it. Cameron has served as the county seat since 1846.
Green-Batte House
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Built in 1847 of logs and locally made brick, this was among Cameron's earliest homes, raised by George Green, a surveyor who had fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in Texas's 1836 fight for independence. As the frontier town matured, board siding went up in the 1850s and later owner R. L. Batte, Sr. added rooms while raising his own children and many orphans under its roof. The now-enclosed cabin survives as a layered record of two families and a young Texas.
First United Methodist Church of Cameron
Cameron, TX
This congregation grew out of the first wave of Methodist missionary work in Texas, tracing its roots to an 1841 camp meeting in Milam County—just four years after the earliest Methodist preachers reached the young republic. For decades a circuit rider served Cameron until the church earned a full-time pastor in 1885, raising a succession of buildings that culminated in the sanctuary first used in 1923.