Taylor: The Town the Railroad Built

In 1876 the International & Great Northern Railroad drew a line across the blackland prairie of eastern Williamson County and platted a townsite beside its tracks. That town — Taylor — grew fat on cotton, and within a generation its Main Street was a wall of two-story brick commercial blocks, a proud post office, and steepled churches. This short downtown walk reads that boom off the buildings themselves: the rail-era storefronts, the bank, the post office, and the schools and churches that a prospering cotton town raised. It's a compact loop through one of the best-preserved railroad-and-cotton downtowns in Central Texas, where the pattern of the streets still points back to the depot that started it all.