Fitzhugh

Fitzhugh was on the border of Hays and Travis counties twenty miles west of Austin. It grew up at the Barton Creek crossing on the old road between Austin and Fredericksburg after the Civil War. In the years of the cattle drives the road through Fitzhugh was the primary trail from western counties to Austin. The community, originally known as Barton Creek Settlement, took the name of another creek in the vicinity when a post office opened in 1898. Fitzhugh was the site of a small public school in the 1880s, and for an unknown period of time George W. Brackenridge of San Antonio made his home there. The community declined in the early twentieth century; the post office closed in 1914, and soon thereafter the population dropped below twenty-five; it was last recorded as twenty-five in the late 1960s.