The Most Beautiful Square in Texas

Georgetown's courthouse square is one of the most complete and admired in Texas — a stately 1911 Beaux-Arts courthouse standing at the center of an almost unbroken ring of 19th-century commercial buildings. Where most Texas towns lost their old squares to fire, wrecking balls, or the flight to the highway, Georgetown kept its Victorian storefronts and then restored them, earning the district a place on the National Register and a reputation as the prettiest square in the state. This short walk circles the whole ensemble: the domed courthouse and the county jail behind it, the cast-iron and pressed-metal facades of the merchant blocks, the old newspaper office, the bank, the fire house, and the spot where the town was founded. It's a lap around a rare survivor — a real, working small-town square that still looks the part.