Spanish soldiers lived temporarily at the current site of Bastrop as early as 1804, when a fort was established where the
Old San Antonio Road crossed the
Colorado River and named
Puesta del Colorado. Bastrop's namesake,
Felipe Enrique Neri, Baron de Bastrop, was a commoner named Philip Hendrik Nering Bogel, who was wanted for
embezzlement in his native country of the
Netherlands. In Texas, he assisted
Moses and
Stephen F. Austin in obtaining land grants in Texas and served as Austin's land commissioner. In 1827, Austin located about 100 families in an area adjacent to his earlier Mexican contracts. Austin arranged for Mexican officials to name a new town there after the baron who died the same year. On June 8, 1832, the town was platted along conventional Mexican lines, with a square in the center and blocks set aside for public buildings. The town was named Bastrop, but two years later, the
Coahuila y Tejas legislature renamed it Mina in honor of
Francisco Javier Mina, a Mexican revolutionary hero and
martyr. The town was incorporated under the laws of the
Republic of Texas on December 18, 1837, and the name was changed back to Bastrop. Overlooking the center of the town is the
Lost Pines Forest. Composed of
loblolly pines (
Pinus taeda), the forest is the center of the westernmost stand of the
southern pine forest. As the only timber available in the area, the forest contributed to the local economy. Bastrop began supplying Austin with lumber in 1839 and then
San Antonio, the western Texas frontier, and parts of Mexico. A fire in 1862 destroyed most of downtown Bastrop's commercial buildings and the county courthouse. As a result, most current downtown structures postdate the
Civil War. In 1979, the
National Register of Historic Places admitted 131 Bastrop buildings and sites to its listings. This earned Bastrop the title of the "Most Historic Small Town in Texas". The first edition of the
Bastrop Advertiser and County News (now
The Bastrop Advertiser) was published on March 1, 1853, giving it claim to be the oldest continuously published weekly (semiweekly since September 5, 1977) in Texas. The wider Bastrop County is also covered by papers such as the
Elgin Courier. On September 4, 2011, two wildfires started when trees fell on power lines. The first fire started in the community of
Circle D-KC Estates near
Bastrop State Park, and the other fire started about north. The two fires merged into the
Bastrop County Complex fire. This was the worst and most destructive wildfire in Texas history, as it destroyed 1,691 homes, killed two people, and caused $325 million of insured property damage. The drought in Texas at the time combined with strong winds from the
Gulf of Mexico caused by
Tropical Storm Lee helped fuel the fire. ==Geography==