Bellville

Bellville, the county seat of Austin County, is at the junction of State highways 36 and 159 and Farm roads 529, 1456, and 2429, in central Austin County. The town was named for Thomas B. Bell, one of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred, who came to Texas in 1822 and built a residence in the Bellville vicinity in 1838. In 1846 voters decided to replace San Felipe as county seat with a new community near the geographic center of the county. Bell offered to donate 108 acres from the Nichols league for the new town. His offer, plus 37½ acres from his brother James Bell, was officially accepted the following year, and the site was surveyed and laid out in 1848. A post office was opened in 1849, and a temporary log courthouse was erected around the same time. In 1850 this courthouse was replaced by a larger structure in the central square. During the early 1850s several merchants, including Hermann Miller and a man named Strother, opened stores around the square. A new brick courthouse was begun in 1854, and other businesses opened in the late 1850s.

The town grew slowly until the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railroad reached it in the winter of 1879–80. In four months the population increased from 300 to 522. Brick structures replaced wooden ones, and opulent Victorian homes were erected. Bellville became a transporting point for the region's cotton crop. In 1898, at the peak of the county's cotton boom, 8,626 bales of cotton were shipped from the town. By 1884 Bellville had two churches, two hotels, a bakery, a lumberyard, three saloons, twelve general stores, a public school, and two weekly newspapers, the Bellville Standard and the Austin County Times. Other signs of the town's rapidly growing prosperity included a library in 1886, the construction of a new courthouse in 1887, and the opening of the first bank in the early 1890s.