About this tour
San Marcos grew up around its courthouse square, and the tight loop of streets facing the Hays County Courthouse still holds one of Central Texas's best-preserved runs of turn-of-the-century commercial architecture. Cut limestone and pressed-brick fronts from the 1880s through the early 1900s stand nearly shoulder to shoulder here — a bank, a fire station, mercantile blocks, and a church — each a small monument to the moment when a river town believed in permanence and built in stone. This is a compact walk of about a half mile around the square, reading the buildings as a set: how a county seat announced itself, block by block, in the decades when the railroad and the college were making San Marcos matter.