Site of Early Belton House

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm gonna do it justice. Picture Bell County, Texas, in the year 1850. The land is raw.

Tents and brush arbors and log cabins and clapboard shanties dot the landscape, and people are moving in before the town is even entirely laid out. They're building Nolanville, the county seat of newly-created Bell County, a place that would later be renamed Belton. And right in the middle of all that beautiful, dusty, barely-organized chaos, somebody had to keep the workmen fed and sheltered.

That somebody was Mrs. Sarah Lawler. In 1850, she erected a large building right here on this site.

Now, the marker is honest about it. It calls the structure little more than a shed. But don't let that fool you.

In a landscape full of tents and brush arbors, a shed was something. In that shed, Mrs. Lawler boarded the surveyors and builders who were laying out the very bones of the county seat.

She was the kind of person a new town needs before it even knows it needs her. Here's the part that puts everything else in perspective. Sarah Lawler was born in Tennessee in 1807.

She came to Texas in 1837, with her husband Eli and their four children. One year later, in 1838, Eli died. She was in a new land, with four children, and she took in boarders.

She kept doing it. And by 1850, she was housing the men who were building the town around her. Sarah Lawler lived until 1890, long enough to see that rough little shed and the surveyor's stakes turn into something real.

The marker calls what she did helping to pioneer county development. I'd say that's putting it just about right.

What the marker says

A large building erected here 1850, by Mrs. Sarah Lawler (1807-1890). In this structure, little more than a shed, Mrs. Lawler boarded workmen who were surveying and building Nolanville (later renamed Belton), county seat of newly-created Bell County. Tents, brush arbors, log cabins, and clapboard shanties dotted the landscape; and people moved in before the town was entirely laid out. Mrs. Lawler, born in Tennessee, came to Texas 1837 with husband Eli and their four children. After his death, 1838, she took in boarders, helping to pioneer county development. (1968)