Smart-McCormick Home

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about the Smart-McCormick Home in Williamson County. Now settle in, because this one's got layers. The year is 1855, and a man named Bryce M.

Smart is building himself a home. Not just any home, mind you, a home that would still be standing generations later, still carrying his name on a marker beside the road. Bryce M.

Smart, born in 1816, was not a man who did one thing. He ran a grist mill. He ran a tannery.

He ran a freight line. The man kept busy, is what I'm saying. But here's the detail that'll stick with you long after you've rolled down the highway and forgotten the county line.

Not far from that home, the Chisholm Trail was moving cattle north, one of the great rivers of livestock this state has ever seen. And in that steady, churning flow of cattle, newborn calves sometimes got left behind. Abandoned.

And it was Smart's children who went out and rescued them. Just picture that for a moment. While the trail bosses pushed the herds on, those kids were out there pulling the little ones in.

That house, built in 1855 by a man born in 1816 and gone by 1880, has stayed in family hands ever since. The McCormicks, fifth generation descendants, own it now. Five generations under one roof, or as close to it as history allows.

Bryce M. Smart built something in 1855 that outlasted him by a good long stretch, and somewhere in that story, between the grist mill and the tannery and the freight line and the children saving calves along the Chisholm Trail, you start to understand why it did.

What the marker says

Smart-McCormick Home, 1855. Built by Bryce M. Smart (1816-1880), who had a grist mill, tannery, freight line. His children rescued newborn calves abandoned on nearby Chisholm Trail. McCormicks, 5th generation descendants, now own home. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1965