Montgomery: Birthplace of the Lone Star Flag

Montgomery is a town of a few thousand souls that carries an outsized claim: it says it is where the Lone Star Flag was born. The man behind that claim is Dr. Charles Bellinger Stewart, the first Secretary of State of the Republic of Texas, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, and — by local tradition — the person who sketched the single-star banner that Texans still fly today. Whether or not his pencil drew the exact flag adopted in 1839, Stewart lived and doctored and lawyered right here, and the town has never let the story go. This short walk loops the original 1837 townsite, one of the oldest incorporated places in Texas, past a frontier law office where young attorneys read their books, the county's oldest commercial building, a Gothic Revival church, and the markers that remember Montgomery's founding, its railroad, and its Civil War sacrifice. It ends with the flag legend itself. Wear comfortable shoes and imagine a county seat when cotton was king.