Robertson County Texas map
31.03° N · 96.52° W · County seat: Franklin · 866 sq mi · Central Time
Robertson County is a strip of land running down the east bank of the Brazos River, and the black bottomland along that river made it one of the heaviest cotton counties in Texas in the 1800s. Calvert, a town of 959 people, still has a mile of 19th-century brick storefronts left over from that boom.
Centered on Franklin. SH-6 runs along the western side through Calvert and Hearne; the Brazos River bottom is the wide wooded band at the county's southwestern edge.
Where Robertson County sits
Seven counties touch it. Limestone County is north and Leon County northeast; Madison County lies east, Brazos County southeast across the Old San Antonio Road, Burleson County south, Milam County southwest across the Brazos, and Falls County northwest.
From the county's center point, Bryan is 26 miles south by straight line and College Station 29 miles southeast; Temple is 49 miles west, Waco 52 miles northwest, Killeen 72 miles west and Georgetown 74 miles southwest. No interstate enters the county.
This is one of the older counties in the state. It was created in 1837, during the Republic, from land taken out of the enormous original Bexar, Milam and Nacogdoches municipalities, and organized the following year. It is named for Sterling Clack Robertson, the empresario who brought settlers into this stretch of the Brazos under a Mexican colonization contract and later signed the Texas Declaration of Independence.
Towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Hearne | City | 4,537 |
| Franklin | City (seat) | 1,611 |
| Calvert | City | 959 |
| Bremond | City | 858 |
Hearne is nearly three times the size of the county seat. Franklin sits inland on US-79; the other three towns are strung along the railroad and SH-6 near the Brazos.
Roads and rails
- SH-6 – the main route, running northwest to southeast along the western side of the county through Calvert and Hearne, then across the OSR line into Brazos County toward Bryan.
- US-79 – the east–west route through Franklin, heading southwest to Hearne and Milano and northeast toward Jewett in Leon County.
- US-190 – joins SH-6 near Hearne and runs west across the Brazos into Milam County.
- SH-7 – crosses the northern part of the county, connecting Marlin in Falls County to Franklin and on east.
- SH-14 – a north–south route east of SH-6 through Bremond, running up toward Mexia.
- SH-OSR – the Old San Antonio Road, which forms most of the county's southeastern border with Brazos County. It is the surviving marked stretch of the Spanish colonial road between the Rio Grande and Nacogdoches.
- Union Pacific main line – the former Houston and Texas Central route runs beside SH-6 through Hearne and Calvert; Hearne grew as a junction on it and still has yard activity.
Calvert and the Brazos bottom
The Brazos River runs along the whole southwestern boundary of the county, and the flat alluvial land beside it — the Brazos bottom — is deep, dark, self-mulching clay. Planters worked it with enslaved labor before 1865 and with tenant and sharecropper labor for decades afterward, and the county's population and wealth were concentrated there rather than in the sandy post-oak uplands around Franklin. Cotton has largely given way to corn, sorghum, cattle and hay, but the field pattern in the bottom still reads as plantation-scale on the map.
Calvert was the boom town of that economy. It grew up on the railroad in the late 1860s, became one of the larger towns in Texas within a few years, and then stalled when the cotton trade shifted. The result is a main street of Victorian brick commercial buildings and surrounding houses well out of proportion to the town's present size; the Calvert Historic District is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and now supports antique shops rather than cotton factors.
Hearne, ten miles south, took over as the rail center. During the Second World War the U.S. Army operated Camp Hearne on the edge of town as a prisoner-of-war camp holding German soldiers, many of them captured in North Africa; parts of the site are interpreted today. Bremond, in the north of the county, was settled by Polish immigrant farm families in the 1870s and still holds a Polish festival each June.