About this tour
Before Round Rock was a fast-growing Austin suburb, it was a frontier crossing that Swedish immigrants turned into a prairie farm town. This drive traces that arc: from the Old Town streets that grew up beside the Brushy Creek ford and the stage road, out to the Palm Valley community where Andrew Palm and his kin built one of the most important Swedish settlements in Texas. You'll pass the homes of founding families, an old stage-stop inn, a pioneer college, and the white-frame Lutheran church that was the heart of the colony. It's a route through the quiet, hard-working half of Round Rock's history — the farmers and immigrants who raised a town while the outlaws and cattle drives got the songs.