Yerge-Hill Family Home
Smithville, Bastrop County, Texas
Marker Inscription
John C. Yerger, 1840 settler from Mississippi, and son-in-law, John W. Hill (1836 - 1928), native of Bastrop County, built this Colonial home, 1887. Moved family store also from Alum Creek to site of Smithville, laid out as a division point on M. K. & T. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1965
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
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.
Why it matters
The home reflects how railroad division points reshuffled Texas settlement, drawing established merchant families to new townsites built around the tracks.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · John C. Yerger
- · John W. Hill
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Smithville
Smithville, TX
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.
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.