UPTON, TEXAS. Upton, seven miles south of Bastrop in central Bastrop County, traces its origins to settler J. P. Young's arrival in the area in 1847. Young was soon joined by John and Tom Hancock and John Bright. The first community school was a one-room log building, which was replaced in 1873 by a frame building erected on land donated by Young. In 1892 the school was moved to a new structure on the current site. Two years later, with the coming of the railroad, a post office was established and the name Como was selected. When it was found that the name was already in use elsewhere, the post office and community became Upton.

By 1914 Upton was a station on the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad and had a population of seventy, a cotton gin, and a general store. The next year a church was built. But the population soon dropped to twenty-five. Although the post office was closed in 1929, in the 1930s Upton had a community center and three schools, two for black children and one for white. Population estimates remained at twenty-five through most of the community's twentieth-century history, with a brief jump to fifty in the late 1960s. In 2000 the population was twenty-five.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: William Henry Korges, Bastrop County, Texas: Historical and Educational Development (M.A. thesis, University of Texas, 1933).

Paula Mitchell Marks