Madisonville, Texas: Founded on a Donated Tract, Named for a President

Madison County was created by the Texas Legislature on January twenty-seventh, eighteen fifty-three, carved out of parts of Grimes, Walker, and Leon counties. The new county needed a seat, and a settler named Job Starks Collard donated a two-hundred-acre tract near the geographic center of the county, which also happened to sit beside a stream-fed lake supplying fresh water. The county and its new seat were both named for President James Madison.

Lot sales began in the summer of eighteen fifty-three, a log courthouse went up the following year, and a post office opened in eighteen fifty-four. By eighteen seventy the town had ninety-eight residents. Madisonville remains the largest town in Madison County, the quiet county seat of a rural stretch along Interstate Forty-Five between Houston and Huntsville.