About this tour
El Campo got its name — Spanish for the field or the camp — from the cowboys who once bedded down here on the open coastal prairie of Wharton County. When the New York, Texas and Mexican Railway came through in the 1880s, the camp became a town, and the flat black-soil prairie around it grew into some of the most productive rice and cotton land in Texas. This short walk visits El Campo's downtown core: its churches, its early bank and library, and the buildings that show a small prairie town that took itself seriously. Wear comfortable shoes and picture the endless grass that surrounded this place before the plows and the rice fields arrived.