Lockhart, Texas

Everything Lockhart is known for

7 songs mention this city 1 artist from here

Music in Lockhart

Songs About Lockhart

Texas Overture
Pere Ubu
97%
"Kreuz's is the king on the Lockhart rail line"
Locked Up In Lockhart
Cactus Lee
82%
"Locked Up In Lockhart"
Drinkin' Problem
Midland
40%
Shiner Bock and Some Texas BBQ
Micheal Martin Heil
17%
"Texas BBQ"
Hey Wade
Paul Eason
13%
"Brisket that don't take a knife, oh my those beans are very nice"
Texas BBQ
Race Ricketts
7%
"TITLE"
Mustang Ridge
Tanya Tucker
3%
"Tryna make it up to Wild Rose Pass"

Artists From Lockhart

R
Robby Abel
country Pop: 1

Rivers & Roads in Song near Lockhart

Songs written about the waterways and highways that run near Lockhart.

Interstate 35 42 songs US Route 90 8 songs Interstate 10 32 songs Texas Colorado River 6 songs Guadalupe River 17 songs

History of Lockhart

The Mansard-Roofed Castle on the Square RoadyGoat

Dominating the square at 110 South Main, the Caldwell County Courthouse is one of the most dramatic county buildings in Texas, a three-story Second Empire pile that looks more like a French chateau than a Hill Country courthouse. Its cornerstone was laid on August 15, 1893, and the building was finished March 19, 1894, replacing an earlier courthouse that the growing county had outgrown. The walls are Muldoon blue sandstone quarried in Fayette County, trimmed in red sandstone and crowned by a steep mansard roof, with a tall central clock tower and matching towers at each corner. The design has long been attributed to noted San Antonio architect Alfred Giles, but research credits the plans to his sometime partner Henry E. M. Guidon, who sold the specifications to the county in 1893; the nearly identical Goliad County Courthouse was built from the same drawings. The courthouse was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1976 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. It has anchored Lockhart's square, parades, and politics for well over a century. (Source: Texas Escapes; National Register of Historic Places.)

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How a County-Seat Cow Town Became the Barbecue Capital of Texas RoadyGoat

You are rolling into the official Barbecue Capital of Texas, and that is not just a chamber-of-commerce slogan. The Texas House of Representatives first declared Lockhart the Barbecue Capital of Texas in a 1999 resolution, and the Texas Senate followed with its own resolution in 2003, making the title doubly official. The honor grew straight out of the town's meat-market past. In the late 1800s German and Czech butchers ran groceries with smoke pits out back, where they cooked the cuts they could not sell fresh, served on butcher paper with no sauce and, famously, no forks. That tradition never died here. Today four legendary joints anchor the town, the so-called Big Four: Kreuz Market, Smitty's Market, Black's Barbecue, and Chisholm Trail Bar-B-Q, several of them tracing their lineage to those original 19th-century meat counters. People drive in from across the state to eat their way through all four in a single afternoon. For a town of fewer than 15,000 people to hold a statewide title in writing is rare; to have earned it with brisket is pure Texas. (Source: Texas Monthly; Texas Legislature resolutions.)

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The Surveyor Who Got Paid in Land, and a Town RoadyGoat

The town around you carries the name of a man who measured Texas for a living. Byrd Lockhart was born in Virginia in 1782 and came to Mexican Texas in 1826, settling in Green DeWitt's colony and making his living as a surveyor; he was commissioned a deputy surveyor that December and laid out much of the land around Gonzales. In 1831 he received the tract that would become this townsite as partial payment for that surveying work, which is how his name ended up on the map. By the mid-1840s several families had settled near the cool, reliable water of Lockhart Springs, and when the Texas legislature carved Caldwell County out of Bastrop and Gonzales counties in 1848, the new county seat was named Lockhart after the surveyor's old grant. The county itself took the name of Mathew Caldwell, a Texas Revolution figure. The town incorporated in 1852, opened an academy in 1850, and by 1858 counted 423 residents. It started, fittingly, with a man whose whole trade was deciding exactly where one piece of Texas ended and the next began. (Source: Handbook of Texas.)

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Lockhart - BBQ Capital of Texas

1900

Lockhart was designated the Barbecue Capital of Texas by the state legislature in 2003. Home to Kreuz Market, Smitty's, Black's, and Chisholm Trail BBQ.

Battle of Plum Creek

1840

On August 12, 1840, Texan volunteers and Tonkawa allies intercepted Buffalo Hump's retreating Comanche raiding party near present-day Lockhart, killing over 80 warriors.

Historical Marker →

Plum Creek, Battle of

1840

The harsh anti-Indian policies of President Mirabeau B. Lamar and Mexican efforts to weaken the Republic of Texas stirred Indian hostilities. Hatred increased after the Council House Fight in San Antonio, March 19, 1840, where 12 Comanche chief were killed. After regrouping and making plans for revenge, 600 Comanches and Kiowas, including women and children, moved across central Texas in early August. They raided Victoria and Linnville (120 mi. SE), a prosperous seaport. About 200 Texans met at Good's Crossing on Plum Creek under Major-General Felix Huston (1800-1857) to stop the Indians. Adorned with their plunder from Linnville, the war party stretched for miles across the prairie. The Battle of Plum Creek, August 12, 1840, began on Comanche Flats (5.5 mi. SE) and proceeded to Kelley springs (2.5 mi. SW), with skirmishes as far as present San Marcos and Kyle. Mathew Caldwell (1798-1842), for whom Caldwell County was named, was injured in the Council House fight but took part in this battle. Volunteers under Edward Burleson (1793-1851) included 13 Tonkawa Indians, marked as Texan allies by white armbands. Texan casualties were light while the Indians lost over 80 chiefs and warriors. This battle ended the Comanche penetration of settled portions of Texas.

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Withers, Marcus Allen [Mark]

1867

Marcus Allen (Mark) Withers, trail driver, the son of Hugh and Mary Jane (Goodrich) Withers, was born on September 23, 1846, in Paris, Monroe County, Missouri, the ninth of his father's eleven children with three wives. When he was six, Mark came to Caldwell County, Texas, with his father and stepmother, Eliza (Bridgeford), and eight brothers and sisters. He was proud of the fact that he rode horseback all the way. Mark made his first trail drive to Johnson City, Texas, at age thirteen. His second trip, in 1862, was to Shreveport, Louisiana. Upon his return to Lockhart, he joined the Confederate Army and served to the end of the war in Company I, Thirty-sixth Texas Cavalry. In 1867 Mark went as a trail hand with a herd to Illinois. On April 1, 1868, he began trail driving for himself and his family. The drive ended in Abilene, Kansas, on July 1, 1868. Joseph G. McCoy was attempting to establish Abilene as a cattle market for the Northeast. In the summer of 1868 Withers was one of four Texans and three California vaqueros chosen by McCoy to rope buffalo and load them on a train to be paraded across country to advertise cattle sales in Kansas. A picture of the loading of the buffalo has been published in many books and papers. Withers went along on the trip, and buffalo were roped again in St. Louis and Chicago, in the country's first "Wild West Show." Withers continued his annual trail drives until 1887, trailing into eleven western states. Some years he had a half-dozen or so herds on the trail at the same time, as many as 15,000 cattle. In the beginning, cattle were bought on credit and sold for cash. When they had to be bought for cash and sold on credit, he quit the trail. He formed various ranching partnerships and established a series of feeding pens around the state, but none were as successful as his trail drives. On January 22, 1869, Withers married Annie Wayland. They had five children. Annie died in 1880. On December 26, 1888, he married Mattie Rebecca Bagley, and they had three children. Withers died at his ranch home, west of Lockhart, on June 9, 1937, and is buried in the Lockhart City Cemetery.

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Wright, William Lee

1899

William Lee "Will" Wright, captain of the Texas Rangers and sheriff of Wilson County, son of Little Berry Wright and Ann Elizabeth (Tumlinson) Wright, was born in Lockhart, Texas, on February 10, 1868. He moved to DeWitt County with his family; later he moved to Wilson County. Wright served during the transition of the Texas Rangers from their horseback era in the early 1900s to the modern Rangers of the Texas Department of Public Safety after 1935. Four Rangers-the "Big Four"-had an enormous impact on this change: Manuel Trazazas "Lone Wolf" Gonzaullas , Francis Augustus "Frank" Hamer , Thomas R. Hickman , and Wright. A talkative, bespectacled man who resembled Theodore Roosevelt, Wright took part in Ranger operations in an intermittent way for nearly four decades. In his early life he became a cowboy on the Eckhardt Ranch in DeWitt County and the Rutledge Ranch in Karnes County. He served as a deputy sheriff of Wilson County from 1894 to 1898. Then in 1899 Wright joined the Texas Rangers and ultimately became part of Company E (later renamed Company C) commanded by John H. Rogers. In 1902 he left the Rangers and was elected sheriff of Wilson County and served in this post for fifteen years. He served one term as president of the Texas Sheriffs' Association. In 1917 Governor William P. Hobby appointed Wright as Ranger captain of Company K (1917-19) and then Company D (1919-25). In 1927 Governor Dan Moody appointed Wright as Ranger captain of Company A, and he served in this capacity until 1933. Wright, called El Capitán Diablo ("The Devil Captain"), and the Rangers under his command searched for draft evaders along the U. S.-Mexico border during World War I , intervened in the railroad strikes of 1922, confronted tequileros during Prohibition , and policed such oil boom towns as Wink. Wright rejoined the Rangers in 1935 and was appointed as a private to Company A by Governor James V Allred . Wright served during the era of the Department of Public Safety and left the service in 1939 at the age of seventy-one. He married Mary Ann "Molly" Brown on December 22, 1892; they had one daughter and five sons that lived to adulthood, three of whom were Texas Rangers. His family lineage links him to several prominent early Rangers, including his grandfather, Joseph Tumlinson , and his great-uncles, Peter Tumlinson and John J. Tumlinson, Jr. Milam H. Wright, a brother, also became a well-known Ranger. William L. Wright died on March 7, 1942, in Floresville and was buried in the city cemetery there. He is an inductee in the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame. A Texas Historical Marker, located on the courthouse square in Floresville, honors Wright.

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Lockhart, TX (Caldwell County)

1831

Lockhart, county seat of Caldwell County, is at the intersection of U. S. Highway 183 and State Highway 142, thirty miles southeast of Austin. It was named for Byrd Lockhart , who in 1831 received the land that later became the Lockhart townsite as partial payment for his surveying work for the Mexican government. During the 1830s settlement in the area was limited by the threat of Indian raids, but after the battle of Plum Creek in 1840, more settlers began to arrive. By the mid-1840s, several families had made their home near Lockhart Springs, and when Caldwell County was established in 1848, the new town of Lockhart became the county seat. The Plum Creek post office, which had served the area since the previous year, was transferred to Lockhart. Lockhart was incorporated in 1852 with a mayor-council government. By that time the community was well established: Isabel Stewart began publishing a weekly newspaper in 1849 or 1850; the Lockhart Academy opened in 1850; a Masonic lodge, built in 1850, provided meeting space for both school and church functions; and by 1855 at least five different churches had been organized. An 1858 census of incorporated towns listed Lockhart with 423 residents. In the late 1860s Lockhart became a starting point for the Chisholm Trail , and, as such, developed as a regional trading center in the early 1870s. Beginning in 1874, however, the arrival of the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway in the southern part of the county and the subsequent establishment of Luling cut into business activity at Lockhart for several years. Lockhart continued to grow, but did not recover its dominance of the county economy until after 1887, when the completion of the Lockhart-San Marcos section of the Missouri, Kansas and Texas line increased access to outside markets. By 1890 Lockhart had electricity, a waterworks, streetcars, four schools, seven churches, and a national bank to serve its 1,233 residents. Aiding its economic growth was the establishment of two more rail lines: in 1889 the San Antonio and Aransas Pass connected Lockhart and Shiner (by way of Luling), and in 1892 the Missouri, Kansas and Texas extended its track from Lockhart to Smithville. In the 1890s and early 1900s Lockhart became an important regional center for processing cotton, with a cottonseed oil mill opening in 1893 and a compress in 1901. The turn of the century also brought the establishment of the Dr. Eugene Clark Library (still extant and said to be the state's oldest continuously operating city library) and Kreuz's Market (still selling barbecue in the early 1990s). The census of 1900 showed that the city population had nearly doubled in ten years, rising to 2,306. The discovery of the Luling oilfield in 1920 again put Lockhart in economic second place in the county, but some Lockhart citizens were able to benefit from investments in the field. Though it did not boom as Luling did, Lockhart grew steadily, its population rising from 3,731 in 1920 to 5,018 in the early 1940s. During World War II the Lockhart-to-Luling branch of the railroad was abandoned (in 1942) as part of the war effort, but as each city had another rail line, neither was irreparably damaged. The agricultural nature of the county economy was reflected in the major businesses in Lockhart at that time: cotton gins and compresses, a creamery, a poultry-dressing plant, a peanut shelling and processing plant, and livestock marketing and shipping facilities. During the 1960s the population of Lockhart leveled off at slightly more than 6,000. In the early 1970s, residents became concerned that Lockhart might develop into a bedroom community for commuters to nearby Austin. In 1973, in an effort to avoid such a development, a group of Lockhart residents established the Lockhart Industrial Foundation, the function of which was to attract new businesses to Lockhart. Though in the early 1990s some Lockhart residents were commuting to jobs in Austin, the Foundation wa

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Things to Do in Lockhart

food 0.1 mi away
Smitty's Market

When the Kreuz family feud split in 1999 one daughter kept the original 1900 brick building on Commerce Street and named it Smittys after her father. The long…
food 0.1 mi away
Smitty's Market

Walk through the flames to get your meat. Built around the original Kreuz pit room in Lockhart since 1999.
food 0.2 mi away
Black's Barbecue

Texas' oldest BBQ joint in continuous operation since 1932. Lockhart institution where the beef sausage is legendary.
food 0.3 mi away
Black's Barbecue

Edgar Black opened this Lockhart meat market in 1932 and four generations of Blacks have run the pits ever since making it the oldest family-run barbecue joint…
food 0.4 mi away
Kreuz Market

No sauce no forks no kidding. Lockhart's iconic smoked meat temple since 1900. Post oak pits and old-school rules.
food 0.8 mi away
Kreuz Market

Charles Kreuz opened his meat market in 1900 and by the nineteen twenties the butcher was smoking cuts out back and serving them hot off the pit with no plates…
food 14.1 mi away
City Market Luling

In Luling they dont fuss with menus. You walk through the dining room back to a little smoke-filled pit room where the butcher hands you brisket sausage and…
nature 15.4 mi away
San Marcos Springs

San Marcos Springs is the second-largest spring system in Texas and the longest continuously inhabited site in North America. Archaeologists found evidence of…
day trip
Day Trip to Lockhart 🍖 (FULL EPISODE) S2 E3

Featured on The Daytripper — a full-episode local travel guide.

Everything Near Lockhart

410 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.

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