Pittsville, Texas

01A Prairie Village Named for a Store

Pittsville took its name from A. R. and Amanda (Wade) Pitts, who ran the general store and distributed mail to nearly every household along the upper Brazos. In an era when a post office defined a community's existence, "getting your mail at Pittsville" meant belonging to a scattered plantation district that stretched for miles in every direction. The 1860 census counted roughly 240 people, a substantial number for an unincorporated prairie settlement in antebellum Texas. Farming and stock raising dominated, but the census rolls also recorded carpenters, wagoners, schoolteachers, a brick mason, an engineer, a minister, a physician, a wheelwright, a machinist, and an artesian-well borer — the full ecosystem of a self-sufficient rural economy.

The village eventually supported several general stores, a blacksmith shop, a millinery shop, a photo studio, and a two-story school that locals called the academy. The post office opened on May 31, 1870, with Lucy Upton serving as postmistress — a detail worth lingering on, because female postmasters in 1870s Texas were uncommon, and Upton's appointment put a woman at the administrative center of the community for nearly two decades.

02Who Lived in Pittsville?

For a village that vanished so completely, Pittsville produced an unusually accomplished roster of residents. Two Confederate surgeons, Robert Locke Harris and A. A. Laurence, practiced medicine here. William Sheriff and J. Wesson Parker both served as Texas state legislators and as Fort Bend County judges. John Huggins, a Pittsville farmer, earned regional fame as an innovator of horseracing techniques — a detail that hints at the prairie's other economy, the informal racing circuit that ran through plantation country before and after the Civil War.

During the war itself, the Pittsville Home Guard drilled on the village commons, and Confederate cavalry units that would later help recapture Galveston camped in the area. The war left the community battered but intact; what finally undid Pittsville was not conflict but infrastructure.

03What Happened to Pittsville?

In 1888, the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad laid track three miles south of Pittsville, bypassing the established village entirely. The railroad's preferred depot site became Fulshear, a brand-new town founded specifically to serve the line. Merchants and farmers who depended on shipping cattle, cotton, and goods had a simple calculation to make: relocate to Fulshear or watch the freight wagons roll past. Most chose the railroad.

The Pittsville post office closed on June 15, 1889, barely a year after the tracks reached Fort Bend County. Families began dismantling houses and moving them south by the wagonload. The two-story academy emptied. The general stores shuttered one by one. By the turn of the twentieth century, Pittsville existed mostly in memory — a place older residents still named when giving directions, even though nothing stood there worth pointing to.

A persistent handful held on for another four decades. Alice Nesbitt and her daughter Doris were reportedly the last, leaving in 1947 and closing the village's century-long run. The prominent families who had defined the place — the Bains, Walkers, Nesbitts, Cumings, Hugginses, Brookshires, Harrises, and Pools — had long since scattered to Fulshear, Richmond, and Houston.

04Can You Visit Pittsville Today?

Yes, though there is almost nothing to see. The site lies along FM 359 near Hunt Road, nineteen miles northwest of Richmond and three miles north of Fulshear, on land now surrounded by the westward sprawl of Greater Houston. The Katy–Fulshear–Simonton corridor has exploded with subdivisions, and the prairie that once isolated Pittsville is rapidly filling in with rooftops. The Texas Historical Commission marker stands on the west side of FM 359 a short distance north of the Hunt Road intersection, and it remains the most visible trace of the village.

05What Remains of Pittsville Today

According to the Handbook of Texas, "the only evidences of Pittsville are an abandoned cistern and a clump of trees." The cistern — a brick-lined cylinder sunk into the prairie to catch rainwater — is the village's last built structure, and the trees likely mark a former homestead yard where someone planted shade a hundred and fifty years ago. Everything else is gone: the academy, the stores, the photo studio, the blacksmith shop, the post office where Lucy Upton sorted mail. Pittsville offers an unusually clean case study in how thoroughly a nineteenth-century Texas community could disappear when the railroad decided to run its tracks three miles south instead.