Stafford: The City with No Property Tax

Stafford is famous for something no other Texas city can claim: it collects no municipal property tax at all, a distinction it has held since the mid-1990s by funding its government through sales tax alone. But long before the strip malls and the corporate campuses along U.S. 90, this was Stafford's Point — a stagecoach and railroad stop named for pioneer settler William Stafford, whose sugar-and-cotton plantation stood on the prairie here in the days of Austin's colony. This short drive traces the layers: the first railroad in Texas that put Stafford's Point on the map, the plantation families who cleared the land, and the school district whose fight for good roads and services helped shape the tax-free city of today. Keep to the public streets, and imagine the cane fields where the freeways now run.