Room 5 of 9 · 1876

The Railroad

Our city was founded as a train stop. However, today, we stop for the train!

In 1876 the International and Great Northern Railroad put a station on the prairie. A town grew around it, and it took a rancher's name.

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Narration is an AI-generated voice.

Early Efforts to Build Railroads in Texas

After the Civil War railroads made the development of Texas possible, and for many years, railroad extension and economic growth paralleled each other.

The story of how the railroad came to Hutto begins in December 1870 in Houston, when the Houston and Great Northern Railroad Company laid track from Houston north and reached Palestine, 152 miles northeast of Hutto in September 1872. During the same period the International Railroad Company (IRC) built a line from Hearne to Palestine (88 miles) and then on to Longview. The IRC tracks were the first in Central Texas to run east and west.

The two companies merged to form the International and Great Northern Railroad (IGNR) Company in 1873 which completed the line from Hearne to Round Rock with a stop in Hutto. These tracks ran about 80 miles, through Milam and Williamson Counties where stops in Rockdale, Taylor, and Hutto were established.

Early Texas rail lines. Map redrawn for the Hutto 150 exhibit.

1876

In April 1876, railroad company representatives bought a narrow strip of land from 19 landowners through what would become Hutto. Some were settlers, others were real estate speculators. The railroad paid between $1 and $77 for this right-of-way. One of those landowners was James Emory Hutto.

The speed at which the tracks were built from Rockdale to Round Rock was primarily due to the Texas Prison System’s Prisoner Lease Program between 1868 and 1882. In August 1876, James Emory Hutto, Sr sold an additional fifty acres on the north side of the tracks to the railroad company.

Hutto Station

With the coming of the railroad, property values increased, frontier residential, commercial, and industrial development expanded, communications quickened, and the ability to export local commodities was greatly enhanced.

Large scale farming, especially cotton, expanded.

Emigrants from Sweden, Denmark, Germany and dozens of other nations came via the railroad motivated by the promise of the fertile Blackland soil farmland and economic opportunity.