Bee Cave

Bee Cave is at the intersection of State Highway 71 and Farm roads 620 and 2244, fourteen miles west of Austin in west central Travis County, and encoupasses a two square mile area with 8,800 acres of extraterritorial jurisdiction. It was settled in the early 1850s by Dietrich Bohls, who relocated near the confluence of Barton Creek and Little Barton Creek and founded what became known as Bee Cave, Texas. The town was named for a large cave swarmed by Mexican honeybees that lived on the creek banks and encompassed much of Western Travis County. A post office opened there under the name Bee Caves in 1870 with Martin V. Lackey as postmaster. By 1871 Will Johnson was operating a trading post at the settlement. In the mid-1880s the Bee Cave community had a steam gristmill, a cotton gin, a general store, a church, a school, and twenty residents. The population fell to ten in the early 1890s but rose to fifty-four by 1914. The post office was discontinued in 1915, and mail for the community was sent to Cedar Valley. The Bee Cave school was consolidated with the Teck common school district in the 1940s and with the Dripping Springs Independent School District in Hays County in 1951. The population was reported at fifty from the 1940s through the 1980s, and the town incorporated in 1987. The village of Bee Cave originially formed as a Type-A General Law city with an Alderman-Mayor form of government. In 1990 it was 241, and it grew to 656 in 2000. By that time Bee Cave had schools, parks and recreational facilities, and a public library. In 2006, the village of Bee Cave became a town, and by 2010 the population reached 3,925. In February 2013, a commission formed and voters approved the new Home Rule Charter in May. An elected City Council consisting of the mayor and five other members set policies for the City government. As of 2015, the city of Bee Cave had an estimated population of 6,515 in city limits with an additional 4,533 living in Extra-Terratorial Jurisdiction for a total of 11,048.