The Towns

Bastrop County has four named towns and a handful of unincorporated communities. Each has its own personality, its own school district, and its own version of "downtown." The towns sit roughly on the river or roughly on a highway, and the geographic spread is large enough that the towns feel genuinely separate — not a metro of suburbs but four small Texas towns that happen to share a county.

Bastrop

The county seat. Population about 12,000. The most preserved historic downtown in the county and the busiest one — five blocks of restored 19th-century brick storefronts on Main Street, anchored by the courthouse and Fisherman's Park on the Colorado. Restaurants, antique shops, a brewery, the Lost Pines Art Center, the Bastrop Museum and visitor center, and the 1889 Opera House all sit within walking distance of each other. The river runs along the eastern edge of downtown; the Lost Pines come right up to the western edge.

Bastrop has been growing fast. The population doubled between 2000 and 2025, and the new construction along Highway 71 east of downtown reflects that. The historic core has held up better than most growing Texas towns' historic cores, partly because Main Street merchants organized early to preserve it and partly because the courthouse anchor kept the legal and government functions in the old downtown rather than letting them migrate to a strip-mall annex.

Smithville

Population about 4,500. A railroad town that became an antiques town that became a movie-location town that became, somewhere in the 2010s, a slow weekend-getaway town for Austin people who want a smaller version of what Bastrop has. The MKT Railroad division-point depot is now a railroad museum. The opera house has been restored. The Page House and several other historic homes are open for tours. The downtown is a couple of square blocks of brick storefronts with a higher antique-shop-per-capita ratio than anywhere else in the county.

The 1998 film Hope Floats was shot in Smithville and the locations are still recognizable. The town has a long and slightly uneasy relationship with the movie industry — productions have used Smithville on and off for decades, and locals have gotten used to occasional film crews showing up and renting downtown buildings for a week. The film angle does not define the town, but it is part of why Smithville's downtown is in the shape it is.

Elgin

Population about 11,000 and growing fast. Elgin sits on Highway 290 at the very northern edge of the county, and the Austin metro has been pushing east into Elgin for the last decade. The town is the legal "Sausage Capital of Texas" and has two long-running smokehouses downtown that ship sausage across the country. The brick downtown is more workmanlike than Bastrop's — less museum-piece, more lived-in — with a real food and arts scene that is younger than people expect.

Elgin is the most demographically transitional of the four towns. It has a substantial Hispanic population, a visible Czech and German heritage from the 19th-century German-Texas migration, and a growing newcomer population from Austin. The annual Western Days festival in July is the closest thing the county has to a unified civic celebration that draws all of those groups together.

McDade

Population about 700. One stoplight. A small but well-curated museum of local history. Watermelons. The annual McDade Watermelon Festival, held in July, is the smallest and most authentic of the county's festivals. McDade ISD operates a single K-12 campus and has the smallest enrollment of any school district in the county.

McDade is the version of small-town Texas that people sometimes deliberately move to. It is rural, quiet, and has a strong sense of who it is. It is not for everyone — the commute to Austin is over an hour, the grocery options are limited, and the town has very few services beyond what you would expect of a 700-person community — but for the people it suits, it suits unusually well.

The Unincorporated Communities

Cedar Creek

Unincorporated, but functionally a town. Cedar Creek runs along Highway 71 between Austin and Bastrop, near the Hyatt Regency Lost Pines and the new tech development corridor along the river. It has its own school zoning, its own retail, its own identity. It is the closest part of Bastrop County to Austin and the part most rapidly being shaped by Austin spillover.

Red Rock and Rosanky

The south-county ranchland communities. Cattle, hay, family land, working ranches. Far from Austin and far from anywhere, but the version of Bastrop County most people picture when they imagine "the country."

Paige, Utley, String Prairie

Smaller named places along the highways. Paige sits on Highway 290 east of Elgin; Utley sits on Highway 71 west of Bastrop; String Prairie is south of Smithville. None of them are towns in the legal sense, but they are real places with their own identities.