Peter Kerr experienced many ups and downs in his business career and with the Texian Army, but he made a lasting mark on Texas history when he purchased land around Fort Croghan in 1851, and donated ten city lots in his new town for a courthouse square to make it the seat of Burnet County in 1852.

Burnet was an obscure “Wild West” village before the railroad arrived in 1882. Suddenly, Burnet became a shipping center for towns all across the western frontier, and business boomed. It was during that decade that the square took shape, and many of the historic buildings there today date back to the 1880s. As the railroad stretched farther to the west, Burnet settled into a period of relative calm that lasted most of a century, when the Burnet square was the social and commercial heart of an agricultural county. Through two world wars and the great depression, through the building of the new courthouse and the huge dams that created the Highland Lakes, Burnet’s square was where folks went to shop, to see their friends, or to see a picture show. The drug store was there, as was the furniture store, the grocery store, the dry goods store, and even the car dealer (or, in the earlier days, the livery stable). The bank, the theater, the hardware store, the doctor, the dentist, the lawyer and the barber; the café, the hotel, the newspaper office, the post office and the telephone company – not to mention the jail and (while it was legal) the saloon - all were centered here on Peter Kerr’s ten lots.

Of course, everything changes. The automobile made its Burnet County debut in the early 1900s. When new highways were built in the late thirties, they bypassed the square, and the business district gradually spread out. The highways not only diverted traffic, they made it easier to drive into the city, and folks with the new-fangled cars started doing some of their shopping in Austin. The lakes brought more tourists and retirees to the county, and ...

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