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Freestone County

Freestone County.

Seat: Fairfield · Teague, Wortham

Lake Fairfield at first light. Built in 1969 as a cooling reservoir for the Big Brown coal‑fired power plant, Lake Fairfield’s warm discharge water supported a famous Florida‑strain bass fishery for decades. The plant retired in 2018; the lake remains.

Freestone County was created in 1850 from Limestone County and named for the freestone water of its springs. The county seat, Fairfield, was platted the same year. Freestone is the smallest of our four counties by area but historically dense in oil and gas activity.

Fairfield · Freestone County Courthouse

Beaux‑Arts on the National Register.

The 1919 Freestone County Courthouse, designed by C.H. Page of Austin in the Beaux‑Arts style, replaced an earlier wood‑frame building. It has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1980 and still serves as the working county courthouse.

Teague

A railroad town that became a junction.

Teague was platted in 1906 as the divisional headquarters of the Trinity & Brazos Valley Railway. Within a decade it had hotels, a depot, and a roundhouse. The B‑RVR depot survives today as a railroad museum.

Wortham

1924: third‑largest oil producer in Texas.

The Wortham Oil Boom of 1924 briefly made Freestone County the third‑largest crude oil producer in the state of Texas. The town’s population swelled to roughly 30,000 at the peak before settling back below 1,500 within a decade. Mineral leases from the boom era still appear in the county’s deed records and shape some of today’s title work.

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