1879 Texas General Land Office Map of Falls County, Texas

A scarce 1879 plat map of Falls County, Texas produced by the Texas General Land Office. It provides a detailed portrait of the county roughly thirty years after its creation.

A Closer Look

Individual landholders are noted throughout with their plots outlined. For older plots, predating the Texas Revolution, the date of acquisition is noted. The Brazos River runs down the center of the map, dividing the county in half, while creeks and other waterways are also noted. A large arrow points to the north, indicating that the map is oriented towards the northwest. A dashed line marks the county border, with many plots straddling the line between Falls and neighboring counties.

Rails through Texas

The Waco and Northwestern Railroad runs roughly parallel to the Brazos on its east bank. It was planned as a means of connecting Waco with the Houston and Texas Central Railway, which linked Houston and Dallas. Though chartered in 1866, progress was slow, and the relatively short line was not completed until 1872, with the two lines meeting at Bremond, at bottom towards right, just beyond the county line into Robertson County.

The choice of this location was no accident, as the land there was owned by Paul Bremond, the founder of the Galveston and Red River Railroad, which later became the Houston and Texas Central. Despite this early and notable success, Bremond's later ventures were not as fortunate and he invested most of his money into the misguided Houston East and West Texas Railway, a narrow-gauge track meant to link Houston, Texarkana, and points throughout Texas and the South, though only a small portion of it was built.

Local History

Sterling C. Robertson, whose descendants still held land along the river at bottom when this map was produced, was an empresario from Tennessee who received a grant from the Coahuila y Tejas legislature to establish a settlement. Known as Nashville Colony or Robertson's Colony, it encompassed a wide section of north-central Texas (some thirty modern-day counties), but its capital was in what became Falls County, at Sarahville de Viesca, near the later town of Marlin. A fort (Fort Milam) was constructed nearby along the river, just to the south of the area seen here, and another town named Bucksnort emerged in the late 1830s, offering shops and services to travelers en route to Dallas or other fairly distant destinations (like Sarahville de Viesca, Bucksnort quickly became a ghost town, explaining its absence here).

Hundreds of families of settlers came to the region from Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi, but the colony's early history was beset by fighting with Native Americans and it was abandoned in the 'Runaway Scrape' during the Texas Revolution. After the revolution and union with the United States of America, Falls County was established in 1850, with a county seat at Adams. However, soon afterwards, Adams was renamed Marlin, in honor of John Marlin, an Irish-born colonist who arrived in the area in 1835 and became an alcalde under Mexican rule. Though Marlin was an early settler on the land, Thomas Chambers soon came to own the area surrounding the town and his descendants retain it here.

The county is named for a waterfall that existed on the Brazos River until 1866, when a storm caused the river to change course (from the 'Old River' seen here) and a new waterfall emerged slightly upriver from the original one.

Publication History and Census

This map was prepared by the Texas General Land Office and printed by August Gast and Co. in 1879. We note it among the holdings of the Library of Congress, the University of Houston, and the Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library. It has no known history on the market.