Fayette County Texas map
29.88° N · 96.92° W · County seat: La Grange · 960 sq mi
Fayette County is the halfway point between Houston and Austin, and Czech and German settlers who arrived in the 1840s and 1850s left it a set of small parish churches with hand-painted interiors — plain limestone and clapboard on the outside, stencilled columns and marbled ceilings inside. La Grange, the seat, sits where SH-71 and US-77 cross the Colorado River.
La Grange is on the Colorado at the county's centre. I-10 crosses the southern third through Schulenburg and Flatonia; Lake Fayette is the reservoir northeast of La Grange.
Where Fayette County is
The county sits in the post-oak and blackland country between the Colorado and the Lavaca, on the Gulf Coastal Plains. Eight counties border it — more than most: Lee to the north, Washington northeast, Austin east, Colorado southeast, Lavaca south, Gonzales southwest, Caldwell west and Bastrop northwest.
Austin is 56 miles northwest in a straight line and College Station 63 miles northeast; Houston lies about the same distance to the east. That midpoint position is the county's economic fact: SH-71 and US-290 carry Austin–Houston traffic across it, and I-10 carries San Antonio–Houston traffic across its southern third.
Fayette was created in 1837 out of Bastrop County and organized the following year, named for Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette, the French general of the American Revolution — La Grange, the seat, takes its name from his country house. It lies in the Texas German belt, and Czech settlement from Moravia was heavy enough that Czech was still spoken in parts of the county well into the twentieth century.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| La Grange | City (county seat) | 4,388 |
| Schulenburg | City | 2,673 |
| Flatonia | Town | 1,321 |
| Ellinger | City | 284 |
| Carmine | City | 245 |
| Fayetteville | City | 245 |
| Round Top | Town | 88 |
No place in the county reaches 5,000 people. Round Top, with 88 residents, is among the smallest incorporated towns in Texas and hosts an antiques fair twice a year that fills the surrounding fields and shoulder of SH-237 with tens of thousands of visitors — the county's biggest single event by a wide margin. Winedale, nearby, holds a University of Texas historical centre known for its summer Shakespeare productions in a restored hay barn. Flatonia is a railroad town where the Sunset Route crosses a north–south line; Schulenburg sits at the I-10 and US-77 junction and is the usual base for touring the churches.
Roads
- SH-71 – northwest from La Grange to Bastrop and Austin, southeast to Columbus and I-10; the Austin–Houston route.
- US-77 – the north–south road through La Grange and Schulenburg, north toward Giddings, south toward Hallettsville and Victoria.
- I-10 – across the southern third through Schulenburg and Flatonia, San Antonio to Houston.
- US-90 – the older parallel highway beside I-10 through Flatonia and Schulenburg.
- US-290 – clips the northern edge at Carmine, the other Austin–Houston route.
- SH-237 – the Round Top road, north from Carmine through Round Top and Warrenton to La Grange.
- SH-95 and SH-159 – SH-95 runs north–south through Flatonia; SH-159 runs east from La Grange toward Bellville.
The painted churches
Five or six parish churches in and around Fayette County are usually grouped together as the Painted Churches of Texas. The best-known cluster lies within a short drive of Schulenburg: St. Mary's at High Hill, St. John the Baptist at Ammannsville, Sts. Cyril and Methodius at Dubina, and the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Praha, near Flatonia. Czech and German congregations built them in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and then had immigrant craftsmen paint the interiors — stencilled ornament, faux marble on wooden columns, stars on blue ceilings.
They are working parish churches, not museums; the Schulenburg chamber of commerce runs the standard tour, and visiting outside a scheduled tour depends on the individual parish. The route between them, on FM roads through Dubina, Ammannsville and High Hill, is one of the better back-road drives in Central Texas.
Monument Hill, the Colorado and the power plant
On a bluff above the Colorado River just south of La Grange, Monument Hill and Kreische Brewery State Historic Sites share one park. The monument is a tomb holding the remains of Texans killed in the Dawson Massacre of 1842 and men of the Mier Expedition executed after the black bean drawing, reinterred there in 1848. The Kreische house and the ruins of the stone brewery Heinrich Kreische built into the hillside in the 1860s stand on the same bluff, with a view over the river bottom and the town.
Northeast of La Grange, the Fayette Power Project — a coal-fired generating station run for the Lower Colorado River Authority and the City of Austin — draws cooling water from Lake Fayette, also called Cedar Creek Reservoir. The lake accounts for most of the county's 10 square miles of water and is managed for fishing, with year-round warm water making it a well-known bass lake.