Florence, TX

Florence sits in northwestern Williamson County, about 13 miles north of Georgetown and 40 miles north of Austin. Martin Jones Wells claimed the townsite in 1841, and the settlement briefly went by Brooksville before its first post office opened under the name Florence in 1857. After the Civil War, cattle, wheat, and cotton shaped the local economy; by the 1890s, the town also had mills, a quarry, a bank, a cheese factory, and a short-lived college. The Bartlett and Western Railway served Florence from 1912 until the line was abandoned in 1935. So the local read is an old post office town with cotton-country roots and a railroad that had a brief run.