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With Washington on the Brazos: Cradle of the Texas Republic, noted historian Richard B. McCaslin recovers the history of an iconic Texas town. The story of the Texas Republic begins and ends at Washington, but the town's history extends much further. Texas leaders gathered in the new town on the west bank of the Brazos in March 1836 to establish a new republic. After approving a declaration of independence and constitution, they fled as Santa Anna's army approached. The government of the Republic of Texas returned there in 1842, but after the United States annexed Texas in 1846, Austin replaced Washington as the capital of the Lone Star State. The town became a thriving river port in the 1850s, when steamboat cargoes paid for many new buildings. But the community steeply declined when its leaders decided to rely on steamers rather than invest in a railroad line, although German immigrants and African American residents kept the town alive. Later, Progressive Era plans for historic tourism focused the town's central role in the Texas Republic brought renewed interest, and a state park was founded. The Texas centennial in 1936 and the hard work of citizens' organizations beginning in the 1950s transformed this park into Washington-on-the-Brazos, the state historic site that serves today as the primary focus for preserving the history of the Republic of Texas.
"Come with us to learn about a great Texas river ... We will explore ... camp on its banks ... and look for places of excitement, beauty and learning - some of them surprising." From its ancient headwaters on the semiarid plains of eastern New Mexico to its mouth at the Gulf of Mexico, the Brazos River carves a huge and paradoxical crescent through Texas geography and history.
This text explores the natural history of Texas and more than 2900 springs in 183 Texas counties. It also includes an in-depth discussion of the general characteristics of springs - their physical and prehistoric settings, their historical significance, and their associated flora and fauna.
The book leads the reader through the past to the present and here leaves him amid active and progressive men who are advancing, along with him, toward the future. Including, as it does, lives of men now living, it constitutes a connecting link between what has gone before and what is to come after. It is therefore fitting that it should be dedicated to a prominent man of our day in preference to one of former times. The matter presented, in the nature of things, is largely biographical. There can be no foundation for history without biography. History is a generalization of particulars. It presents wide extended views. To use a paradox, history gives us but a part of history. That other part which it does not give us, the part which introduces us to the thoughts, aspirations and daily life of a people, is supplied by biography. The men whose deeds are recorded in this book were or are deeply identified with Texas, and the preservation in this volume in enduring form of some remembrance of them—their names, who and what they were—has been a pleasant task to one who feels a deep interest and pride in Texas—its past history, its heroes and future destiny.
"Communities have spent more than 100 years mastering the mighty Brazos River and its waterways. In the 1800s, Stephen F. Austin chose the Brazos River as the site for the first Texas colony because of its vast water and fertile soil. Within 75 years, a pumping station would herald the way for crop management. A sugar mill that was eventually known as Imperial Sugar spurred community development. In 1903, John Miles Frost Jr. tapped the Brazos to expand the Cane and Rice Belt Irrigation System while Houston newspapers predicted the infrastructure marvel would change the region's future--and it did. Within a few decades, the Texas agricultural empire caused Louisiana to dub Texas farmers 'the sugar and rice aristocracy.' As the dawn of the industrial age began, the Brazos River and its waterways began supplying the Texas Gulf Coast industry"--Publisher description.
Charles Barnard, a Connecticut entrepreneur, settled in the Brazos Valley in 1849, running an Indian Trading Post. He built a gristmill in 1860 near the confluence of the Brazos and Paluxy Rivers, around which the town of Glen Rose sprang up. Captured here in over 200 vintage photographs and postcards is the history of this quintessential little Texas town, from its origins as a mill town, to the bedroom community of Fort Worth that it has become today. In its earliest days, settlers flocked to the region from the war-torn South during the Civil War. By the 1900s, both Somervell County and Glen Rose established fame as a tourist resort, offering springs and artesian waters to heal the body and spirit. Naturopathic and magnetic healers built sanitariums, while locals built tourist parks to entertain the crowds that came for rest and relaxation. Showcased here are images of the Hill postcard collection, which relay the intriguing story of Glen Rose as a recreation mecca, the Moonshine Capital of Texas during Prohibition, the discovery of the infamous dinosaur tracks, and its development as it enters the 21st century.
Thousands of black men died violently at the hands of mobs in the post–Civil War South. But in Brazos County, Texas, argues Cynthia Nevels, five such deaths in particular point to an emerging social phenomenon of the time: the desire of newly arrived European immigrants to assert their place in society, and the use of racially motivated violence to achieve that end. Driven by economics and the forces of history, the Italian, Irish, and Czech immigrants to this rich agricultural region were faced with the necessity of figuring out where they fit in a culture that had essentially two categories: white and black. In many ways, the newcomers realized, they belonged in neither position. In the end, they found ways to resolve the ambiguity by taking advantage of and sometimes participating directly in the South’s most brutal form of racial domination. For each of the immigrant groups caught up in the violence, the deaths of black men helped to establish racial identity and to bestow the all-important privileges of whiteness. This compelling and superbly written study will appeal to students and scholars of social and racial history, both regional and national.