Caldwell County Courthouse Square

Most travelers know Lockhart for barbecue, but the town's real showpiece is the 1894 Caldwell County Courthouse — a Second Empire pile of limestone and marble with a mansard roof and a clock tower, widely counted among the most beautiful and most photographed courthouses in Texas. This short walking loop circles the square and the streets just off it, taking in the county jail, the oldest continuously operating public library in the state, two historic churches, a couple of landmark homes, and the marker to the Battle of Plum Creek — the fight that opened this land to Anglo settlement. It is well under a mile on foot, a compact tour of the civic, sacred, and domestic heart of a Texas county seat that has kept its nineteenth-century face remarkably intact.