La Grange, Fayette County, Texas--A Brief History

In 1860 Heinrich Kreische, a German immigrant from Saxony, established in La Grange one of the state's first commercial breweries. Though many of the German immigrants in the area were against slavery, the plantation economy of Fayette County influenced many La Grange residents to support southern rights as they understood them in the years leading up to the Civil War. In 1858, for example, a mass meeting was held in La Grange to protest the admission of Kansas to the Union as a free state.

In early 1861, when the Civil War began, a number of militia companies were organized at La Grange to aid the Confederate cause. Some of the Germans in La Grange fled to Mexico or returned to Germany; still others formed the La Grange German Company, organized as a State Reserve unit in July 1861. Though La Grange was untouched by fighting during the Civil War, during Reconstruction the town was torn by conflict and disorder. Local peace was disrupted in May 1865 as returning Confederate veterans robbed local German businesses, provoked arguments and fights, and, on one occasion, threatened to burn down the town. La Grange was occupied by federal troops in 1866, and an agency of the Freedmen's Bureau was established there to protect the rights and welfare of the many freed slaves in the surrounding area. Friction between the federal authorities and ex-Confederates in the town led to a number of altercations that sometimes, as one source put it, "reached the proportions of a first-class riot."

From August to December 1867 La Grange was ravaged by a deadly yellow fever epidemic that killed 240 people-about 20 percent of its population at the time. Some of the dead were buried in mass graves. La Grange began to grow again as a trade center during the late 1800s, especially after the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway began service there in 1880 and the city's first bridge was built across the Colorado River in 1883. Though the arrival of the railroad helped to put the Kreische Brewery out of business, by 1884 the city included four churches, three schools, an opera house, an oil factory, and a bank. Its population had grown to 1,800, and two weekly newspapers, the Journal and the Slovan (a Bohemian paper), were being published. Two more banks were established in La Grange during the late 1880s, facilitating the local cotton trade and strengthening the city's position as a shipping center. A three-story stone county courthouse was completed in 1891.

By 1896 the city had electric service and a waterworks, as well as the opera house, two bridges, four schools, five churches, three banks, three gristmills and cotton gins, and three newspapers, including the Deutsche Zeitung, a German-language publication. By 1900 some 2,392 people lived in La Grange. The town declined during the first two decades of the 1900s; its population dropped to about 1,960 by 1910 and to about 1,665 by 1925. La Grange grew again during the late 1920s, however, to reach an estimated population of 2,800 in 1929. During the Great Depression the number of businesses reported in La Grange dropped from 130 in 1931 to only 75 in 1933; by that year the population had also declined to about 2,350.

By 1939, however, La Grange had begun to recover, as that year 140 businesses and about 3,000 residents were reported there. After World War II the city's traditional economic base was threatened by declining cotton production in the area; during the 1950s La Grange civic leaders attempted to attract more industries. In 1960 the city included a mattress factory, a furniture-manufacturing plant, two banks, two cotton gins, three hatcheries, seven feed mills, and more than 100 retail establishments. By 1969 it also included a bottling plant, a structural-steel fabricator, and a business that built laminated beams; that year the city created a comprehensive plan for its future development. Nevertheless, by the early 1970s all but one of the cotton gins in La Grange had closed, and businesses in the city offered few new opportunities for young people; many left the city after graduating from high school.

Meanwhile the population of La Grange varied from 2,729 in 1950, to 3,623 in 1960, 3,092 in 1970, and 3,768 in 1980. La Grange received national attention during the late 1970s and early 1980s when the story of the Chicken Ranch was publicized through the Broadway production of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and by a Hollywood film of the same name. In 1990 the United States census counted 3,951 people living in La Grange. Just outside of the city is Monument Hill, where Nicholas Mosby Dawsonand other members of the ill-fated Dawson massacre of 1842 are interred.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: La Grange High School, Fayette County: Past and Present (La Grange, Texas, 1976). William L. Richter, Overreached on All Sides (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991). Leonie Rummel Weyand and Houston Wade, An Early History of Fayette County (La Grange, Texas: La Grange Journal, 1936). John Leffler

Excerpted from the Handbook of Texas Online: LA GRANGE, TX
http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/

The Handbook of Texas Online is a joint project of The General Libraries at the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas State Historical Association.