Blanco Historic District

Blanco's historic core spreads across roughly eight blocks around the courthouse square, north of Town Creek in the Texas Hill Country. Forty-six properties make up the district, of which 25 date to 1941 or earlier and retain their character. The centerpiece is the Old Blanco County Courthouse, a two-story Second Empire building of native limestone completed in 1886. It served as the county seat for only four years before voters moved the seat to Johnson City, after which it held a school, bank, offices, medical facilities and other uses. Around it stand mostly one-story commercial buildings, such as the rough limestone Cage Building of 1908 and the Masonic Building of 1907, along with brick buildings of the 1920s and 1930s, houses, a jail, and wool and mohair warehouses tied to the local agricultural economy. Native limestone, used from the 1860s to the 1940s, gives the district visual unity, while later concrete block and cedar-sided buildings interrupt it in places.