Bastrop's Historic Main Street

Few Texas towns kept their old downtown as fully intact as Bastrop. Founded in 1832 on the Colorado River along the Old San Antonio Road, the town survived floods, the Civil War, and the highway bypass that hollowed out so many small Main Streets — and today its commercial core still reads like a 19th-century catalog of Central Texas building: cast-iron storefronts, a Second-Empire courthouse, a stone jail, an 1889 opera house, and the oldest Episcopal church building still in use in the whole state. This walk is a tight loop of roughly half a mile through that district, moving from the courthouse square out along Main and Church Streets. It's a chance to read a town's history in its architecture — brick by brick, cornice by cornice — in one of the most complete historic downtowns Texas has left.