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Robertson County

Robertson County.

Seat: Franklin · Calvert, Hearne, Bremond

Calvert — Main Street, looking south. Calvert briefly held the title of fourth‑largest city in Texas during the cotton boom of the 1870s, when its steam‑powered cotton gin was the largest in the world. The entire downtown is on the National Register of Historic Places, with intact 1860s and 1870s commercial brick buildings running for several blocks along Highway 6.

Robertson County was created in 1837 by the Republic of Texas and named for Sterling C. Robertson, an empresario who held the Mexican land grant for the area. The Brazos River forms the county’s eastern boundary, and the bottomlands along it supported the antebellum cotton economy that built Calvert.

Franklin · Robertson County Courthouse

Seat moved with the railroad.

Franklin became the county seat in 1879 after the railroad bypassed Calvert. The current 1881 brick courthouse is the second on the Franklin square and has held the deed records of the county continuously since.

Camp Hearne

A WWII POW camp on the prairie.

From 1942 to 1945, Camp Hearne held roughly 4,800 German prisoners of war — mostly Afrika Korps soldiers captured in North Africa. Several original buildings still stand. The site is preserved as a museum on the original ground southwest of Hearne.

Brazos River bottomlands

The cotton-economy floor.

The alluvial soils of the Brazos bottomlands along the county’s eastern boundary are some of the most fertile in Texas. They were the floor of the antebellum cotton economy that built Calvert and Hearne, and many of the original land grants from the Robertson Colony are still traceable through the deeds today.

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