Rockwall Square & the Republic's Road

Rockwall is Texas's smallest county by area, and it wears that distinction proudly. Carved out of Kaufman County in 1873 and named for the strange buried stone formation discovered nearby in the 1850s, it built its life around a courthouse square that still anchors the old downtown. This tour circles that square and the blocks around it, taking in the historic courthouse, the county's oldest congregation, its museum, and a length of one of the most ambitious projects the Republic of Texas ever undertook: the Central National Road, a 30-foot-wide highway authorized in 1844 to stitch the young republic to the United States. You'll move from the heart of the square out to the edges of town, following pioneer churches and the faint line of a road older than the State of Texas itself. It's a compact loop through a small county's outsized history.