Alleyton: The Railroad's First Stop West

Alleyton sits just east of Columbus and holds a distinction easy to miss from the highway: for several years during and after the Civil War, it was the western terminus of the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado Railway, the first railroad built in Texas.

Settled in eighteen twenty-one by the Alley family, who gave the town its name and donated land for the railroad in eighteen fifty-nine, Alleyton became a critical Confederate supply depot. Goods from Houston moved by rail to Alleyton, then by wagon west. After the war, when the railroad finally pushed on toward San Antonio, Alleyton's moment passed almost overnight. Today it is an unincorporated community of fewer than two hundred people, its former commercial importance invisible beneath the quiet of Colorado County farmland.