Smithville
Smithville, Bastrop County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1691 missionaries on the expedition of Don Domingo Teran de Los Rios sighted a lagoon which the Indians called Nenocadda. The lagoon, known today as Shipp's Lake, is on the southern edge of present Smithville. Frederick W. Grasmeyer operated a ferry here on the Colorado River in 1836. Steamboats plied the river from 1845 to about 1865. The village of "Old Smithville" was laid out on 640 acres of land granted to Thomas J. Gazley and Lewis Lomas. The town was located along the Colorado River in the northeast section of present Smithville. There were mercantile stores, dry good shops, and a Masonic lodge. In 1876 the first post office was established with John Pride Jones as postmaster. The Taylor, Bastrop & Houston Railroad, later a part of the Missouri, Kansas & Texas system, arrived in 1887, and the town relocated along the tracks. The legend is that a coin was tossed to decide if the name would be changed to Burlesonville for Murray Burleson, who gave land for the railroad depot. The coin toss resulted in "Smithville" being retained as the name, apparently in honor of pioneer settler William Smith. The town was incorporated in 1895 and T. C. Collins served as the first mayor. (1979) Incise in base: Marker Sponsor: Smithville Chamber of Commerce 1977-78
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The Smithville area was noted as early as 1691, when a Spanish expedition sighted an Indian-named lagoon still known today as Shipp's Lake. A ferry crossed the Colorado here in 1836 and steamboats plied the river until the 1860s, but the town's fate was sealed by the railroad: when the Taylor, Bastrop & Houston line arrived in 1887, "Old Smithville" picked up and moved to the tracks. Legend says a coin toss kept the name Smithville over "Burlesonville" before the town incorporated in 1895.
Why it matters
Smithville's shift from riverboat landing to trackside town captures how the railroad rewrote the map of nineteenth-century Texas, moving whole communities to the rails.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The land around present-day Smithville has been noticed by travelers for a very long time. The marker reaches back to 1691, when a Spanish expedition crossing this part of Texas took note of a lagoon the Indigenous people called Nenocadda — the body of water known today as Shipp's Lake. That single detail is a window onto an older Texas, long before towns and railroads, when the region was Native land and Spanish explorers were passing strangers mapping rivers and lakes.
By the 1830s, the story shifts to the Colorado River itself, which shaped everything here. A ferry crossing operated at this spot in 1836, and for two decades beginning in 1845 steamboats worked the river. In frontier Texas, before railroads and paved roads, a navigable river was a highway, and a river crossing was a natural place for people and commerce to gather. "Old Smithville" grew up along the water in exactly this logic — a river town for a river age.
That early village had the makings of a real community: mercantile stores, dry-goods shops, and a Masonic lodge, the fraternal hall that so often served as an early Texas town's civic anchor. A post office followed in 1876. The town was a going concern — but it was built for a world about to be replaced.
People & events
The people named here mark the town's transitions. Frederick W. Grasmeyer ran the ferry across the Colorado in 1836, embodying the river-crossing era. The land for "Old Smithville" came from grants to Thomas J. Gazley and Lewis Lomas, and John Pride Jones opened that first post office in 1876 — the everyday builders of a nineteenth-century Texas settlement.
Then came the event that rewrote everything: the arrival of the Taylor, Bastrop & Houston Railroad in 1887, a line later folded into the Missouri, Kansas & Texas system — the famous "Katy." Rather than wait for wagons and steamboats to reach it, the town simply picked up and relocated to sit along the tracks. A whole community moved to meet the railroad.
And then there's the coin toss — the kind of story that makes a town's history human. Legend holds that a coin was flipped to decide whether the relocated town would be renamed Burlesonville, honoring Murray Burleson, who had donated land for the depot. The coin came up for keeping "Smithville," apparently honoring the pioneer settler William Smith. The town incorporated in 1895, with T. C. Collins as its first mayor — the formal beginning of the Smithville that endures.
Its place in the American story
Smithville's move to the tracks is one of the clearest small-scale illustrations of a force that reshaped the entire United States in the late nineteenth century: the railroad decided which towns lived and which faded. All across the country, communities that had thrived on rivers, wagon roads, and ferry crossings found their fortunes suddenly tied to whether the rails came near. Some boomed; others, bypassed, dried up and vanished.
What makes Smithville so vivid is that it didn't just decline or boom in place — it physically relocated. That literal picking-up-and-moving is a striking, concrete version of a national pattern, the moment the map of settlement was redrawn along steel lines. The transition from steamboat landing to trackside town compresses the whole nineteenth-century American shift from water transport to rail into a single town's biography.
Even the coin-toss legend touches something larger: the way American place-names were often settled by chance, personality, and local negotiation rather than grand design, and how donating land for a depot could nearly buy a town's name.
If you visit
Smithville rewards a visitor who likes layered history. Stand in town and hold two maps in your mind at once: the older village that once lay along the Colorado River to the northeast, and the town you're standing in, which arranged itself around the railroad in the late 1880s. The very layout of the place is a historical document.
Look toward the river and Shipp's Lake and imagine the ferry and the steamboats — the older, water-borne Smithville. Then notice how the streets and the heart of town relate to the rail line; that geometry is the story of the 1887 move made visible.
This is an easy and pleasant stop on a central Texas drive between Austin and Houston, in the piney, riverine Bastrop County country. If you're chasing railroad-town history, Smithville is a small gem — a place where a coin toss, a donated depot, and the arrival of the Katy line still explain why the town is where it is and called what it's called. Don't expect a museum-piece monument; expect a real, living town whose whole shape is the exhibit.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Frederick W. Grasmeyer
- · William Smith
Related events
- · Arrival of the Taylor, Bastrop & Houston Railroad
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Yerge-Hill Family Home
Smithville, TX
John C. Yerger, who settled in Texas from Mississippi in 1840, and his son-in-law John W. Hill, a Bastrop County native, built this Colonial-style home in 1887. They also moved the family store from Alum Creek to the new town of Smithville, laid out as a division point on the Missouri-Kansas-Texas (Katy) Railroad. The house stands as a record of that founding-family enterprise.
The Gotier Trace
Bastrop, TX
Blazed in the 1820s, the Gotier Trace linked San Felipe, capital of Stephen F. Austin's colony, with Bastrop, threading across the counties of early Anglo Texas. It was no engineered highway but a marked path—dusty in drought, boggy in rain—named for settler James Gotier, who with several kin was killed in a raid near the route in 1837. From such rough traces the pattern of Texas travel was first drawn.
Early History of the City of Bastrop
Bastrop, TX
Long home to the Tonkawa and Comanche, this stretch of the Colorado River became strategic when Spanish explorers blazed part of El Camino Real, the King's Highway, across it in the years after 1691. A fort and community rose here in 1805 to guard the road, and by 1825 the site was one of the first settlements in Stephen F. Austin's colony, first called Mina and then renamed Bastrop in 1837 for the influential land agent Baron de Bastrop. Its founding families went on to serve in the Texas Revolution and the Mexican War, and the town became county seat and home to a noted military academy.
Bastrop Christian Church
Bastrop, TX
Founded before 1857, this congregation first gathered in the county courthouse, then in a rock church raised on this site in 1867. The New England Victorian building standing today was erected in 1895 and still rings the old rock church's bell — a bell that once called passengers aboard a Colorado River steamboat. Its history threads together frontier worship and the river commerce that once moved through Bastrop.