The History of Waxahachie, Texas

Waxahachie was founded in August 1850 as the seat of the newly created Ellis County, on a tract donated by an early settler named Emory W. Rogers. The land was rich Blackland Prairie, and Waxahachie became a cotton town — for a stretch, one of the biggest inland cotton markets in the state, its wealth built on the crop and the farms around it. That cotton money would soon buy the town the landmark that made it famous.

In 1897 the county finished a new courthouse, and it was a showstopper: a red sandstone and granite Romanesque Revival pile designed by James Riely Gordon, so ornate it's often called the second-most photographed historic landmark in Texas after the Alamo. Its style rubbed off on the whole town. Waxahachie's builders piled Victorian 'gingerbread' woodwork onto houses and buildings all over, earning it the nickname the Gingerbread City — with hundreds of structures now on the National Register of Historic Places, from the octagonal Chautauqua Auditorium to the Sims Library. Trinity University even made Waxahachie its home from 1902 to 1942 before moving to San Antonio.

That preserved 19th-century look made Waxahachie a natural film set — a run of acclaimed movies shot there in the mid-1980s, including Places in the Heart, Tender Mercies, and The Trip to Bountiful. The town's strangest near-miss came in the same era: the federal government began building the Superconducting Super Collider in the countryside outside Waxahachie, a giant particle accelerator that would have been the largest in the world, before Congress killed the project in 1993 with miles of tunnel already dug. Today Waxahachie is a growing southern gateway to the metro along I-35E, still trading on the gingerbread charm it had the sense to keep.