Brownwood: Oil, Education, and the Cross Timbers Hub

Brownwood sits at the center of Brown County, named for Henry Stevenson Brown, a Republic of Texas soldier from the revolution era. The county was organized in eighteen fifty-eight with Brownwood as its seat, a cattle and farming town on the upper Colorado River tributaries.

The economic transformation came in the early twentieth century, when commercial oil production began in the county and wells were drilled across the area. That boom funded the commercial district that still defines downtown. Howard Payne University, a Baptist liberal arts college, was established here in eighteen eighty-nine, giving the city an educational anchor that has outlasted the oil era. Brownwood today is the commercial hub of the Texas Cross Timbers, a compact city of about eighteen thousand that has held its regional role for a century and a half.