About this tour
Long before it was the Sausage Capital, Elgin was a brick town. The clay under Bastrop County fired into a hard, uniform paver, and Elgin brickworks shipped streets, buildings, and sidewalks across Texas — from Galveston to Austin, whole downtowns were literally built on Elgin. That same brick and the Houston and Texas Central Railway that carried it built the town itself: the churches, the lodge hall, and the fine houses that still line these blocks. This short walk works through Elgin's heritage core, from the centennial marker at the old downtown down through a tight cluster of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century landmarks. It's under a mile of easy walking that reads the town's architecture as its autobiography.