People had been aware of the Lampasas springs long before the town was built around them. A legend has been told of St. Juan, who led an expedition from San Antonio in 1735; it was a very dry year, and there was no water at all in the Colorado River. His party had split up to search for water, and everyone was about to die of thirst, when the frustrated priest threw his crucifix to the ground and cursed the inhospitable land. Water came bubbling up out of the earth at the exact place where each of the men lay dying. According to the legend, the expedition was saved and the springs were born.
We know that Indians (and huge herds of buffalo) had been frequenting the springs long before 1735, but it was probably then that they (and the nearby river) were named Lampasas. Some say that Lampasas is an Indian word for water lilies; others say that a Spanish soldier was reminded of the Mexican town Lampazos.
The True Issue, a newspaper in LaGrange, published a very interesting letter on August 18, 1855. A reader had been to Lampasas, and reported on the original sale of town lots July 4.
“The scenery is rather picturesque and romantic, than grand or wild,” the observer reported. “There are at present about 75 tents, besides eight or ten dwelling cabins, which contain an average of about four inmates, I suppose.” “There is a market open at all times with the necessaries, and some luxuries.”
“All in all, a pretty fair village,” the writer concluded. “Resembling, I presume, a ‘big digging’ in California. (Remember, this was soon after the Gold Rush of 1849.)
Just two years earlier, in 1853, Moses and Nimrod Hughes had brought their families from the relative safety of Williamson County to the wilderness surrounding the springs in what is now Lampasas County. Moses Hughes had heard Indians tell of the healing powers of the springs, and was determined to see if they would help his ill wife. Within three weeks of their arrival, his wife had recovered, and the fame of the springs spread across the countryside.
It was a time when westward expansion had reached the Hill Country, anyway, and soon there were quite a few adventurous settlers. John Burleson had received title to 1,280 acres near the springs in 1838 for his service in the Texas Revolution. He took possession of his land in 1854, and the town (first called Burleson) was laid out on his property by George and Elizabeth Scott (Elizabeth was John Burleson’s daughter) in 1855. The Scotts designed a spacious square with wide streets and plenty of room for tethering horses.) Small city lots were priced at $5.00, $7.50, $10.00 and $12.50. Sales totaled more than $2,000 the day described in that “letter to the editor.”
By the next February, there were six hundred settlers; 135 of them signed a petition to organize Lampasas County from parts of Bell and Travis Counties. The new county was formed March 10, and the town’s name was changed to Lampasas.
By then, Moses Hughes had built a grist mill on Sulphur Creek, and a little settlement was growing up around him. The first stores received merchandise from Houston, but soon the developing town of Round Rock became the main source for all kinds of supplies. Much of Lampasas was built with lumber hauled in ox-carts from Round Rock. The first county newspaper (the Chronicle) was published in 1859.
The town grew during the late 1850s, and the 1860 census counted a population of 872, including three doctors, four teachers, two ministers and even a silversmith. A stagecoach arrived three times a week from Austin, often bringing immigrants who had come to the Texas capital by railroad from the port cities of New Orleans or Galveston. As with most of the Hill Country, growth was stifled during the 1860s by the Civil War, and marauding Comanches forced the few remaining men to form the Lampasas Guards for protection; that group functioned until 1870. In the meantime, the city’s downtown was not well-maintained; free-ranging hogs destroyed all attempts at landscaping, and the square became an unsightly mudhole.
The next decade saw renewed growth, but the growth was accompanied by further upheaval. Fire, floods and feuds marred the young town’s history; the first wood courthouse burned to the ground (with all the county records) on Christmas Eve in 1871, and the second one was washed away in a terrible flood in September of 1873.
The news wasn’t all bad; in 1869, a two-story rock school building was built on Sulphur Creek, the old Gracy Hotel (now the Keystone Hotel) was built in 1870, and the city of Lampasas was incorporated in 1873, as citizens responded to the need for a law prohibiting livestock on the public square. Fifteen to twenty businesses, including the profitable Dunn Molasses plant, surrounded the square, and a theater was built for community entertainment sometime in the 1870s. A track for horse racing was built in 1875.
But during the 1870s, Lampasas history was dominated by gunfights. The state’s “Reconstruction” government was hugely unpopular in Texas anyway, and poor transportation and communication systems in frontier towns like Lampasas created safe havens for all kinds of lawlessness. Upstanding citizens were forced to band together for protection, and vigilantism was common.
In January of 1873, Lampasas County Sheriff S.T. Denson was shot while attempting an arrest. A posse sent to bring in the shooters was stopped by a gang led by Ben, Tom and Mart Horrell. When Lampasas County Justices of the Peace appealed to the state government for help in 1873, Governor E.J. Davis issued a proclamation banning firearms in town.
Seven state police officers led by Captain Thomas Williams were sent to Lampasas to enforce the ban, but when they arrested Bill Bowen on March 14 for carrying a firearm, Captain Williams and three other officers were killed in a shootout at Jerry Scott’s Lampasas Saloon. Mart Horrell, who had been wounded in the shootout, and Jerry Scott were arrested and held at the jail in Georgetown; the rest of the gang attacked the jail and released them in May. In the meantime, Governor Davis had been voted out of office, and new governor Richard Coke disbanded the unpopular state police; law enforcement responsibilities along the frontier were once again entrusted to the Texas Rangers. When four members of the Horrell Gang were tried in 1876 for the murder of the state police officers, they were acquitted by a jury of their peers.
While the Horrells were dangerous men, and feared by many of their neighbours, they met their match in another rough-and-tumble rancher. Pink Higgins was a hard-working family man with nine children, but he was a pragmatic frontiersman who figured that the best defense was a good offense. He ran afoul of the Horrell Gang in 1876, when he accused Merritt Horrell of stealing his cattle. The charges did not stick, but threats were apparently made on Higgins’ life, and he decided to strike first. In January of 1877, he walked into the Gem Saloon on the west side of the Lampasas square, and shot Merritt Horrell dead. A number of ranchers from north of town, most notably Bob Mitchell and Bill Wren, sided with Higgins, and gunfire erupted whenever the two sides met. Texas Rangers were called in to keep the peace, but it didn’t seem to help.
On June, someone broke into the courthouse and burned all the papers related to ongoing criminal cases. Just two days later, a huge gunbattle on the Lampasas square took the lives of three men, including Bill Mitchell’s brother Frank, who until that time had been an innocent bystander in the feud. One of the Higgins cowboys was killed in an ambush shortly after the gunfight in town, and Texas Rangers arrested the leaders of both gangs.
Tom and Mart Horrell were shot to death inside a Meridian jail cell before they came to trial. Pink Higgins was acquitted of murder in the death of Merritt Horrell. Sam, the only surviving Horrell brother, packed up his family and moved to Oregon; Higgins moved to the Texas Panhandle, where he worked as a range rider for the Spur Ranch. (A final gunbattle, possibly related to the feud, took place in 1902; Pink Higgins shot and killed Bill Standifer, a friend of the Horrell Family, in a pre-arranged duel near Higgins’ cabin. Higgins turned himself in to the sheriff, but once again, he was exonerated on the grounds of self-defense.)
By 1880, Lampasas was becoming a civilized town; the Texas Rangers had restored order, and several churches had been built to balance the influence of the saloons. But it was the arrival of the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railroad in 1882 that really changed the nature of the town.
All of a sudden, city folks could easily avail themselves of the healing spring waters in Lampasas. All of a sudden, merchandise and building materials could be shipped in bulk. All of a sudden, Lampasas became a supply source for towns farther west. The gunfighting and cattle-driving days were over, and Lampasas turned into a resort city, often called the “Saratoga of the South.” When Texans were asked to choose a site for the University of Texas, Lampasas finished fifth in the voting.
The population jumped to nearly 3,500, and many lived in tents because houses could not be built quickly enough. John Hanna bought 70 acres around one of the springs, and built a world-class health spa which included heated baths, a hotel and an opera house on beautifully landscaped grounds. During the construction, workers removed tons of buffalo skeletons from around the spring, where apparently some of the weaker animals had become bogged down in the spongy ground and, unable to free themselves, died right there.
In 1883, a syndicate of railroad executives built the luxurious, 200-room Park Hotel near Hancock Springs, and ran a mule-drawn street-car from the railroad station. Huge crowds attended the horse races in Lampasas. The north side of the square was built by 1883, and the appraised value of property topped $1 million; that same year, construction began on a beautiful new courthouse. Centenary College Preparatory School was opened in February of 1884 (in two three-story buildings north of town) by the local Methodist Episcopal Church. (First-year enrollment was 174 and tuition was $25 per 5-month semester; Christmas break lasted 1-1/2 days.) Lampasas was a favorite site for conventioneers: wool growers from 12 surrounding counties met at the Park Hotel in 1884, and 3,000 attended a Democratic Party BBQ that same year.
But the glory days didn’t last long. The railroad was extended west, and much of the population and commercial activity went with it. Two blocks of downtown Lampasas were destroyed by fire in September of 1884.
It wasn’t enough to kill the now-solid community. The Lampasas Volunteer Fire Department was formed, and many businesses rebuilt. However, fires continued to be a major problem, and in 1887, the “finest building in the city,” the opera house at Hanna Springs, was burned to the ground. The fabulous Park Hotel went out of business, and Centenary College took over the building in 1894. When the building burned a year later, the college closed.
Still, the town continued to thrive. A new elementary school was built in 1895. By 1900, there were still 3,000 residents in Lampasas, and 5,000 more around the county. City-dwellers enjoyed electricity, telephones and city water. A few years later, the automobile age arrived, and signs in 1910 advised motorists of the 12 mile-per-hour speed limit. The city purchased a $3,000 fire truck from American LaFrance in 1915. Lampasas settled in to a mature, civilized existence that has lasted for more than a century.
That’s not to say that nothing interesting happened in the meantime, but that the town became a safe, pleasant agricultural town where families put down roots and lived comfortable lives. The Texas Baptist Association established a 200-acre retreat at Hancock Springs, and built the two-story Hostess House dining hall there in 1905. A spring-fed, open-air pool was built in 1911, which doubled as a baptistery for hundreds of converts at their regular retreats. The park was sold to a private company in 1929, then to the city in 1936.
The present Lampasas High School was built in 1927. Highway 66 (now 281) was built during the 1930s, and the Lampasas section was named Key Avenue after J.R. Key, who had been instrumental in several road projects. Drs. Herbert Bailey Rollins and Winston Marshall Brook built a hospital on the north side of town in 1935.
World War II brought major changes as the government set aside 118,000 acres in the adjoining county for Camp Hood (now Fort Hood, with more than 200,000 acres) in 1942, and thousands of soldiers came to Lampasas for recreation. The park at Hancock Springs was dedicated to their use as “Panther Park” during the war. In 1948, the city built a golf course, baseball diamonds, picnic facilities and a playground near the popular springs (now called Hancock Park)..
In 1950, Jim and IraDell Storm opened the Dairy Cue Restaurant on Key Avenue. It rapidly became one of the town’s most popular eateries and remains so (as Storm’s) to this day. Elvis Presley ate there when he was stationed at Fort Hood in 1958.
During the Korean War, in March and April of 1952, the American military used Lampasas County to stage a huge training exercise called Operation Longhorn. More than 115,000 personnel were involved, as a mock invasion and counter-attack were held in area towns and ranches. Lampasas itself was “captured” and occupied for a few days before being liberated in a huge airborne assault. Many local youngsters never did understand that it was not real!
A terrible flood devastated the city in 1957, when Sulphur Creek overflowed its banks and sent a five-foot surge of water into the downtown area. Many buildings and vehicles were destroyed, but the town came back stronger than ever. A series of levees and reservoirs were constructed to reduce the possibility of future floods.
Hunting and fishing have become increasingly popular in Lampasas County since World War II, and the town holds several events each year to attract visitors. The largest event on the Lampasas calendar is Spring Ho, a week of activities for all ages and interests, centered around the springs which gave Lampasas its start. Spring Ho began in 1972, when a group of citizens headed by Gary Martin and Milton Boone decided to give the community “something to do” in the summer. It began as a three-day party, and got a huge boost the very next year, when it became the focus of the Lampasas Centennial celebration. It has since grown into a week-long celebration each July, with a parade, carnival, booths, games and quality live entertainment.
In 1976, the Lampasas Bicentennial Committee created a museum committee to put together a historical museum for the city of Lampasas. The committee purchased the historic 1870s-era Lampasas Plumbing and Sheet Metal building at 305 S. Western Ave. and the Keystone Museum opened its doors with a Texas Rangers exhibit in July of 1979.
More recently, an active arts community led by Nancy Gray of the Fourth Street Gallery has formed the Lampasas Association for the Arts to create a beautiful sculpture Garden at Hanna Springs Park.
Lampasas is a charming town with a rich history. It’s a great place to live, and a great place to visit. It is blessed with a variety of restaurants, shops, parks and historic buildings, as well as a thriving economy, good schools and a beautiful setting. Be sure to visit this July, and celebrate Spring Ho with thousands of others who love Lampasas.
Read more articles from the Summer 2008 issue.