24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Anderson, TX

Anderson is a small city and the county seat of Grimes County in Southeast Texas, with just 193 residents in the 2020 census, a fraction of its nineteenth-century size.

The entire town and its surroundings are listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Anderson Historic District, added in 1974.

Anderson began as Henry Fanthorp's stagecoach stop: Fanthorp bought the east quarter of Francis Holland's 1824 land league in 1833 for 25 cents an acre, built his inn in 1834, and was running a stage stop with weekly mail service by 1835.

When Grimes County was organized in 1846, voters placed the county seat at the new town and named it for Kenneth Lewis Anderson, the last vice president of the Republic of Texas, who had died at the Fanthorp Inn in 1845.

Anderson boomed from 1846 to 1885 with two steam sawmills, six cotton gins, five hotels and the Dance Brothers pistol factory, which made handguns for the Confederacy, reaching about 3,000 people when it was once the fourth largest town in Texas.

At least six different Anderson newspapers were published between 1854 and 1900.

In 1859 Anderson rejected a Texas and Central Railroad connection and was soon surpassed by neighboring Navasota, and the town did not accept a railroad until 1903.

The Fanthorp Inn where the town began is preserved today as a Texas Historical Commission state historic site.

Anderson's Grimes County Courthouse, an Italianate building designed by F. S. Glover and Company and completed in 1893, was restored in 2002.

Anderson's city government lapsed for most of the twentieth century and voters defeated reviving it in 1983, but the town reincorporated in 1998 after sewer problems threatened the courthouse.