12 Texas Towns With Unforgettable Main Streets

Texans know how to make a main street worth the trip. There is the classic Americana courthouse under a big sky, all turrets and clock tower. There is the smell of brisket from two doors down, and a dance hall or a restored opera house lit up for the night. In the best of these places, you can still stand where earlier Texans did their trading and voting and Saturday nights out. You remember a main street like that long after you leave, and Texas has more of them than almost any state. These twelve are the ones worth planning a trip around.

Granbury

Granbury grew up around its courthouse, and the square the townspeople built in the 1880s is the reason to come. At the center, the Hood County Courthouse went up in limestone in 1890 with a French Second Empire clock tower that architect W. C. Dodson designed to be seen from the highways coming in. The square around it was the first courthouse square in Texas added to the National Register of Historic Places.

A resident company stages a full season of live theater at the 1886 Granbury Opera House, a few doors down on East Pearl Street. Restored 19th-century storefronts ring the rest of the square, holding boutiques, wine rooms, and cafes, and there is a Jesse James legend attached to a grave just off the plaza that locals will happily argue about. The Texas Legislature named Granbury the Celebration Capital of Texas, and on a festival weekend you understand why.

Nacogdoches

Nacogdoches calls itself the oldest town in Texas, and it has the paperwork to back it up: a Caddo settlement first, then a Spanish outpost founded in 1779, decades before Texas was a state. That long history is written into the downtown, where brick-paved streets laid in the 1920s run past storefronts that have held businesses for generations. It is a genuinely walkable core, and the pace slows to match.

The Durst-Taylor Historic House, one of the oldest homes still standing in town, has a blacksmith shop and gardens on its grounds. The visitor center nearby is a good first stop for a walking-tour map. Between them, the independent shops and cafes give you plenty of reasons to linger in a place that has been welcoming travelers since before the Alamo.

Gonzales

Gonzales fired the first shot of the Texas Revolution, and the townspeople have built their downtown around that memory ever since. St. Joseph Street runs past the square where Anglo colonists and Mexican troops faced off in 1835 over a small cannon, under a banner reading "Come and Take It." The buildings that line the street today went up in the decades after, once the town settled into life as a county seat.

The Gonzales County Courthouse, a red-brick Romanesque Revival design finished in the 1890s, stands at the heart of it. A few steps away, Texas Heroes Square is the memorial to the men who fought in the revolution, and the actual "Come and Take It" cannon sits in the collection at the Gonzales Memorial Museum. The Old Jail Museum, in a restored lockup from the 1880s, is one of the more memorable small museums in the state. Antique shops and cafes fill in the rest.

Lockhart

Lockhart smells like oak smoke, and the pitmasters have earned the reputation. The Texas Legislature made it the official Barbecue Capital of Texas, and South Main Street runs a short walk from the pits that built that name. The town grew up as a stop for cattle drives and later the railroad, and the storefronts from that era now share the district with landmarks of a different kind.

The 1894 Caldwell County Courthouse stands over the square in Second Empire limestone, mansard roof and all, and it is one of the most photographed courthouses in the state. Kreuz Market has been selling smoked meat in town since 1900. Black's, a couple of blocks over, is the oldest barbecue joint in Texas run by the same family across the generations. Come hungry, and come before the brisket sells out.

Bastrop

Stephen F. Austin established Bastrop in 1832 on a bend of the Colorado River, at a natural ford that traders had used for a century. Main Street grew alongside the water, and the town has held onto more of its early buildings than almost anywhere in the state, with over 130 structures on the National Register. Locals call it the most historic small town in Texas, and downtown makes the case in brick and shade trees.

The Bastrop Museum and Visitor Center, in a former fire and police station, tells the story of the early settlement and the Lost Pines woods that surround the town. The 1883 Bastrop County Courthouse stands a block away. Walk to the western end of downtown and the street opens onto the Colorado River, a quiet stretch of water that started the whole thing.

Alpine

Alpine exists because the railroad needed a stop, and in 1882 it put one here in the high desert between the Davis and Glass mountains. The town became the trading center for a huge and empty stretch of West Texas, and Holland Avenue is still where all of it gathers into a few walkable blocks. The Davis and Glass ranges close off each end of the street, framing the brick storefronts against bare peaks.

The Granada Theatre has stood on the avenue since 1928, its marquee restored and still lit for films and live music. Sul Ross State University sits up the hill, and its Museum of the Big Bend is the best primer on the region you will find. More than forty murals cover the downtown walls, painted with cattle drives and desert scenes, and there is a mural map to help you track them all down. It is the last real town before Big Bend, and it makes the most of the role.

Brenham

Brenham sits at the heart of Washington County, the patch of ground where Texas declared its independence, and its downtown district has been the commercial center since the late 1800s. Restored storefronts hold boutiques, bakeries, and antique shops, and murals painted by local artists brighten the alleys between them. It is an easy place to spend an unhurried morning.

The Washington County Courthouse, an Art Deco building from 1939, stands over Main Street. The Brenham Heritage Museum keeps its collection in the old 1915 post office nearby, and the professional company at Unity Theatre draws audiences from across the region for a full season of plays. Save time for Blue Bell, which has made ice cream at its Brenham creamery since 1907 and opens a visitor center just outside downtown. Come the first weekend of May, the town throws Maifest, the oldest festival of its kind in Texas.

Waxahachie

When the railroad reached Waxahachie in the late 1800s, cotton money followed, and the town spent it on architecture. The result is a downtown square built to impress, crowned by the 1895 Ellis County Courthouse, a Richardsonian Romanesque pile of pink granite and red sandstone with hundreds of faces hand-carved into its stone. Filmmakers use it regularly, and it is among the most photographed courthouses in Texas.

The storefronts around the square hold restaurants, coffee shops, and antique stores, and the Rogers Hotel has stood as a Main Street landmark since the cotton era. Webb Gallery, a downtown fixture, is hung with folk and outsider art that you will not find in many small towns. Locals call Waxahachie the Gingerbread City for the ornate Victorian trim on its houses, and every June the Gingerbread Trail tour brings visitors inside some of the finest of them.

Palestine

The railroad changed everything for Palestine. The town was founded in 1846 near the courthouse, but when the tracks came through, merchants moved the shops and hotels to a new downtown, and the main district now covers the blocks between the Anderson County Courthouse and the old depot. Palestine was the first place in Texas with electric streetlights, and locals nicknamed the main thoroughfare the Great White Way.

The Redlands Hotel, built in 1914 to house railroad travelers, is the oldest hotel in town and now holds a restaurant and shops behind its restored brick front. The visitor center sits in a century-old depot, a fitting spot to pick up a walking-tour map. The Texas State Railroad still runs steam and diesel trains through the pine forest from here, and every spring the Dogwood Trails Celebration fills the surrounding woods with white blooms.

Georgetown

The people of Georgetown put real effort into their downtown, and it shows. The town grew up around Williamson County's business in the 1800s, and the square today holds the finest collection of high Victorian commercial architecture in the state, which is why Georgetown was the first Texas city to win the Great American Main Street Award. Residents call it the most beautiful town square in Texas and keep a full calendar of markets and events on it.

At the center stands the 1911 Williamson County Courthouse, a Neoclassical building whose copper dome and columns rise over a ring of late-Victorian storefronts. A resident company puts on musicals, dramas, and classic films at the 1925 Palace Theatre, a block off the square. Around them, restaurants, wine rooms, and shops fill the restored buildings, and on market Saturdays the whole square comes alive with people. Southwestern University, the oldest in Texas, sits just up the road.

Fredericksburg

German immigrants laid out East Main Street when they founded Fredericksburg in 1846, and they built it wide and straight in the practical style they brought from home. The limestone buildings and Sunday-house cottages that went up in those first decades are still the bones of downtown, now filled with bakeries, wine rooms, and shops selling Hill Country peaches, leather goods, and German pastries.

The Vereins Kirche sits at the center of it all, a stone rebuild of the octagonal church, school, and meeting hall the settlers put up in 1847, with exhibits on those early years inside. A few blocks east stands the National Museum of the Pacific War, which fills six acres and honors Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, a Fredericksburg boy who grew up in his grandfather's hotel here before commanding the Pacific Fleet in World War II. It is a startling thing to find at the end of a Texas Hill Country street, and one of the best history museums in the state.

Jefferson

Before highways, Jefferson had water. Steamboats came up Big Cypress Bayou from the Red River in the mid-1800s and turned Jefferson into one of the busiest inland ports in Texas, and Austin Street filled with the brick storefronts and hotels that all that trade could support. When engineers cleared a giant logjam downstream in the 1870s, the water level dropped, the boats stopped coming, and the boom froze in place. That accident of history is why the street looks the way it does today.

You can stay at the Excelsior House, which has taken guests since 1858 and is often called the oldest hotel in Texas. Across the street sits the Atalanta, the private railroad car of magnate Jay Gould, who wanted to run his line through town and was turned down flat. The Gone With the Wind museum around the corner holds a deep collection of film memorabilia, and the antique shops between them make it easy to lose an afternoon.

Reading a Texas Main Street

The pleasure of these downtowns is in how differently they got here. Jefferson was made by a river that no longer carries its trade, Alpine by a railroad the town still relies on, Lockhart by the cattle trade and the smoke that outlasted it, Georgetown by a stubborn civic decision to preserve what earlier towns tore down. The buildings that survived were built for that original work, and they still stand because people kept finding new uses for them.

Pick any one of these streets and you get a walkable history lesson with good food at the end of it. Line up two or three within a short drive, as the Hill Country and East Texas both let you do, and you start to see how a whole state grew up around the simple business of a main street. That is a trip worth taking at a slow pace.