Lockhart, Texas (unnamed copywriting)

Lockhart, Texas, the county seat of Caldwell County, had humble beginnings, but has grown to be a respectable community and the home of County government in Caldwell. Started by the first Anglo man to set foot in what is now called the county, Lockhart started as a small farming town, and became a center of activity in the newly formed County.

In the early 1800s, a man named Green Dewitt was tasked with setting up county boundaries throughout Texas. This was not a task that could be done alone, and in multiple assistants. One of these assistants was a man named Byrd Lockhart. In his surveying work, Lockhart ended up being the first to set foot in what would now become Caldwell County.

Lockhart took it upon himself to create the roadways and trails that would connect this area to the rest of inhabited Texas. Using his own money in his own means, Lockhart said up method of travel between the larger cities in his own plot of land. Other settlers came to the area, and as a result a small community was started. Originally, this community was named after Lockhart and was on the outskirts of Gonzales County.

Throughout its early life, however, residents were dismayed by the quality of roads connecting Lockhart to the county seat of Gonzales, and more importantly, dismayed by the distance to get there. As a result, they made the decision to create a new county, and to place their town as the center of the county and the new county seat.

The new county was named after Capt. Matthew Caldwell. Caldwell was a scout for the Texas Rangers, an adept and skilled fighter. His individual band of Rangers would fight in the Battle of Plum Creek, and later go on to fight against Mexico in the fight to grant Texas its own Republic. He was considered a local hero, which is why they named the county in his honor.

Eventually, the droughts of the late 1800s made agriculture here quite difficult. Growing and cultivating corn and other agrarian crops became next to impossible within Caldwell County. However the one plant that had no problem growing, grass, made the county excellent land for raising and driving cattle. Because of this that Lockhart's first major cattle drive was long what would become to be known the Chisholm Trail. Due to his excess on this cattle drive, and great grazing land of Caldwell County, Lockhart would become a major stopping point on the Chisholm Trail.

In the 1920s, Lockhart had a taste of oil, as so many other small Texas towns did, and found a small level of success in the oil business. There are enough shallow oilfields in the area, and were the time, but smaller but successful oil wells were formed and are still actively pumping today.