From the time a Spanish expedition first encountered the Lost Pines as it crossed the Colorado in 1691 to the early 1800s, explorers and travelers recorded the names of at least 60 Indian groups they encountered in the Bastrop area. When Anglo settlers began moving in, some of these Indians resisted fiercely. Comanches mounted on horses proved to be resourceful foes who boldly seized opportunities to drive off livestock, make away with slaves, women and children or do fierce battle with whoever opposed them. Other groups, including Tonkawas, actively aided the settlers against their traditional Comanche enemies.
Part of the present Bastrop County was included in the territory which the Mexican government designated for Stephen F. Austin's original colony in 1823. As settlement went forward, Austin won permission in 1827 to expand the colony north of the Old San Antonio Road and establish a town where the 1795 Spanish road from East Texas to San Antonio crossed the Colorado River, the site of a guard house for soldiers watching the road as early as 1806. The town was named Bastrop for Austin's friend and business associate Philip Hendrick Nering-Bogel, a native of the Netherlands with a shady past in Europe. After a varied career in Spanish North America he eventually settled in San Antonio where he called himself Baron de Bastrop.
By 1832 the town of Bastrop was formally laid out and development went forward despite Indian incursions and rising tension between Mexican authorities and Anglo settlers. At first Bastrop leaders, having sworn loyalty to Mexico, sought accommodation with the government. They even petitioned to change the town's name to Mina, in honor of a hero of the Mexican Revolution against Spain. But as tempers flared and attempts at mediation crumbled, the area rushed volunteers to the armed rising against Mexico in 1835-36.
A Bastrop man, Richard Andrews was the first revolutionary to die in the struggle. He was killed at the Battle of Conception, Oct. 28, 1835. The leading local Indian fighter, Edward Burleson, commanded Texan forces at the successful Siege of Bexar that fall and later served as second in command to Gen. Sam Houston at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto. About 60 Bastrop men fought Santa Anna that day. A political foe of Houston after the war, Burleson also served a term as vice president of the Republic of Texas. When the Alamo fell, 12 Bastrop soldiers died in the battle.
For the town of Bastrop the war of revolution was nearly a disaster, however. When news arrived that the Alamo was overrun, settlers fled pell-mell toward the Brazos River bottom with as many of their goods, cattle, slaves and other possessions as they could quickly huddle together. In fact a Mexican detachment from San Antonio soon appeared in Bastrop to find the town empty. The soldiers and possibly Indian raiders left little of value to return to as the settlers drifted back after the so-called Runaway Scrape to rebuild their homes, farms, and businesses.
With Bastrop as the county seat, Bastrop County was among the 10 original counties created in 1836 by the First Congress of the Republic of Texas. After an 18-month effort, Bastrop finished second in a competition to name a permanent capital for the Republic in 1839. The nod went to a tiny community called Waterloo some 30 miles up the Colorado. Local disappointment was partly offset, however, by the opportunity to supply Bastrop area pine and other timber for new construction as Austin began to grow in earnest. Indeed, after agriculture, lumbering was the area's major industry for many years. Cotton planting, sometimes quite profitable, also expanded during the 1840s. Both industries depended increasingly on slave labor to prosper, especially after Texas became one of the United States in 1845, the same year that all Native Americans were legally expelled from the county.
Bastrop grew in wealth and sophistication over the next 15 years. By 1860 the town could boast of a newspaper, fine homes, beautiful churches, growing commerce and a fashionable private school attended by one of Sam Houston's children and a future Texas governor, Joseph Sayers. But as sectional conflict threatened the national government and Texas seceded from the Union, many Bastrop Academy students volunteered along with their neighbors for service in the Confederate armies.
On the home front, local officials opened their meager treasuries for the war effort. N.B. Tanner, a Bastrop gunsmith, won a modest contract to manufacture rifles. Other businessmen launched a cotton mill. But it was not a happy time at home. In 1862 a fire destroyed the 900 block of Main Street, the heart of the business district, including the office of the Bastrop Advertiser whose owners were away in the war.
Before the South surrendered in 1865, money became scarce, trade withered and the families of many soldiers fell into distress. Even the wives of officers did not scruple to accept the scant assistance available from depleted public coffers and exhausted private charity.
With slavery abolished at the war's end, Bastrop's economic, political and social life underwent difficult transformation. But agricultural production was reestablished, trade revived and cultural activity resumed. Railroads brought new activity to the county in the 1870s, first a line far north of Bastrop which spawned the bustling towns of Paige, McDade and Elgin. Steel rails first reached Bastrop in 1886, and as the line struck toward Houston it fostered the development of Smithville around a junction with a line from the west in the 1890s.
As the 19th century drew to a close, key developments in Bastrop showed that citizens still looked forward with high expectations, not backward to past troubles. In 1883 the county erected an imposing brick Courthouse to replace an earlier structure destroyed by fire. In 1892 officials erected a Victorian-style jail beside it. Both, recently restored, are still in use. In 1889 a group of local businessmen launched the town's first bank. Later in the year it received a charter as First Nation Bank of Bastrop. Today it hold deposits over $100 million. Also in 1889 other businessmen erected the Bastrop Opera House. Today, restored, it remains a showcase for theatre, music and other cultural activities. It also serves as the city's official visitors center.
In 1892 the city council, with voter approval, borrowed $20,000 to establish Bastrop's first tax supported free public school system. Today as an independent school district, the system enrolls more than 5,000 pupils, a number larger than Bastrop's resident population. In 1894 as the city's first water lines were being laid the Bastrop Volunteer Fire Department was organized to protect homes, commercial buildings and other property as it does to this day.