Elgin: Sausage Capital of Texas

Say "Elgin" to a Texan and there's a good chance the next word is "sausage." Since 1882 this Bastrop County railroad town has been turning out a coarse, all-beef, black-pepper-forward link that locals call "hot guts" — beef ground rough, seasoned hard, stuffed into a natural casing, and smoked over post oak in the German and Czech tradition that immigrant butchers carried into Central Texas. Two family smokehouses still carry the flame, and the state legislature eventually made the nickname official. This short drive traces the lineage of the Sausage Capital of Texas: the market that invented the style, the second-generation house that kept it going, the downtown where it all started, and the marker that tells the town's own hundred-year story.