Conroe

Conroe, the county seat of Montgomery County, is on Interstate Highway 45 at the junction of the Union Pacific and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroads, seven miles southeast of Lake Conroe in central Montgomery County. In 1881 Houston lumberman Isaac Conroe established a sawmill on Stewarts Creek two miles east of the International-Great Northern Railroad's Houston-Crockett line on a tract of land in the J. G. Smith survey, first settled in the late 1830s. A small tram line connected the mill to the I-GN track, but Conroe soon transferred his operations down the tracks to the rail junction, where his new mill became a station on the I-GN. In January 1884 a post office was established at the mill commissary, and, at the suggestion of railroad official H. M. Hoxey, the community took the name Conroe's Switch, in honor of the Northern-born, former Union cavalry officer who founded it and served as its first postmaster; within a decade the name was shortened to Conroe.

In the mid-1880s the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway extended its Navasota-Montgomery spur eastward through the town, which thus became the only junction of major rail lines in the county. Conroe Mill School was established in 1886, and not long afterward the community's first Black school was founded at Madeley Quarters, south of town. A lumber boom beginning in the late nineteenth century in the Piney Woods of eastern and central Montgomery County attracted scores of settlers to Conroe. By 1889 the population had climbed to an estimated 300. In that year Conroe replaced Montgomery as county seat. A residence donated by Isaac Conroe served as a temporary courthouse until a permanent brick structure could be erected in 1891. By the early 1890s Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist congregations were organized in the town; they initially shared a single house of worship. Simultaneously, Black residents founded Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal congregations.