Belton Commercial Historic District

The Belton Commercial Historic District is an excellent example of an evolutionary late 19th and early 20th century commercial downtown area. Contextually it relates to Agriculture in Texas, specifically the cattle and cotton industries, for which Belton served as a regional center at various times in its history. The nomination is submitted in conjunction with the Historic Context "Community Development in Belton, 1850-1945" and relates to the statewide Community and Regional Development context as an example of the rapid growth experienced by many Texas towns and cities in the period between 1880 and 1930. The district is eligible for listing in the National Register under Criterion A, significant in the areas of Commerce and Politics/Government, for its association with events central to the history of Belton. It also meets Criterion c in the area of Architecture as a collection of late 19th and early 20th-century commercial and public buildings which typify the distinct periods of Belton's historic growth.

The history of the Belton Commercial District is closely tied with the growth and development of Belton during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Founded in the early 1850s, Belton emerged by the time of the Civil War as an important regional trading and governmental center. As the county seat and the largest settlement in Bell County, the town served as a supply point for area farmers and ranchers and as a processing center, shipping center, and marketplace for agricultural products. (For a more comprehensive treatment of the town's history and development see the associated context statement).

Belton's earliest mercantile businesses were housed in crude log and clapboard buildings around the courthouse square. During the early years of the town's settlement, many of the buildings also served as residences for storeowners' families. More permanent structures began to be built after the Civil War when Belton became an important stopover point for cattle drives heading north. The Chisholm Trail, the main route for cattle drives through central Texas, passed along the eastern edge of the city. During the peak years of the cattle drives during the late 1860s and early 1870s, the business district expanded rapidly and many of the earlier wooden structures were torn down to make way for larger, more permanent limestone buildings. A major fire in 1879 destroyed much of the business district directly north of the courthouse, but by the early 1880s, most of the area had been rebuilt. A bird's eye view of the city produced by Augustus Koch in 1881 shows that the eight city blocks comprising the Commercial Historic District were substantially built up by that time.

Railroads reached Belton during the 1880s, further spurring the development of the business district while influencing the direction of its growth. The depot for the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe was built more than a mile north of the courthouse square beyond the city limits and therefore had little impact on the development of downtown itself, other than to heighten the prominence of North Main Street as the north/ south arterial. When the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad agreed to build a spur line into Belton, however, the depot was built downtown where the line terminated three blocks northeast of the courthouse. A second MKT depot, built in 1899, survives one block north of the square on North Main Street.

The arrival of the railroads also allowed for the inexpensive shipment of building materials from the industrial cities of the North and Midwest. As a result, a variety of pre-fabricated materials--cast iron, pressed sheet metal, milled lumber--began to be used on storefronts in the downtown area. Brick was locally produced after the Civil War and during the latter half of the century brick increasingly replaced native limestone as the principal building material in the downtown area.

During the decade of the 80s, cotton replaced cattle as the basis of the local economy. Belton's merchants came increasingly to rely on cotton farmers for a substantial portion of their business. A number of cotton-related businesses--brokerage firms, shippers, and cotton processors--opened in the downtown area. Despite the growth of nearby Temple (which replaced Belton by the early 1890s as the county's largest city), the merchants continued to prosper through the 1920s, in large measure due to the cotton business. By the early 30s, however, cotton began to decline in importance, and the downtown area began a slow decline. Many businesses were forced to close and little building took place between 1930 and the end of World War II.

The construction of Camp Hood west of the town in the 1940s temporarily helped to buoy the downtown economy and after the war, many new businesses opened. As a result of the post-war craze to "modernize," the facades of many commercial buildings were covered or reconstructed in an attempt to emulate new construction, thereby destroying the architectural detailing on a number of buildings. Belton has also had many historic buildings razed, most notably the block directly west of the courthouse.

Despite these changes, the Belton downtown area remains a fine example of a late 19th and early 20th-century commercial district. A significant number of the stores and other businesses built during Belton's heyday between 1870 and 1920 have survived and the area appears substantially as it did at the turn of the century. Several blocks, particularly the 100 and 200 blocks of Central Avenue, the 100 block of N. East Avenue, and the 100 block of N. Main Street, retain much of their turn-of-the-century character.