About

In 1881, Houston lumberman Isaac Conroe established a sawmill on Stewart's Creek two miles east of the International Great Northern Railroad's Houston-Crockett line on a tract of land in the J. Smith survey, first settled in the late 1830's. A small tram line connected the mill to the track, but Conroe soon transferred his operations down the tracks to the rail junction, where his new mill became a station on the I-GN. In January 1884, a post office was established at the mill commissary, and, at the suggestion of railroad official H.M. Hoxey, the community took the name Conroe's Switch, in honor of the Northern-born, former Union cavalry officer who founded it and served as its first postmaster; within a decade the name was shortened to Conroe.

In the mid 1880's the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway extended its Navasota Montgomery spur eastward through the town, which thus became the only junction of major rail lines in the county. A lumber boom beginning in the late nineteenth century in the Piney Woods of eastern and central Montgomery County attracted scores of settlers to Conroe. In 1889, Conroe replaced Montgomery as the county seat. A residence donated by Isaac Conroe served as a temporary courthouse until a permanent brick structure could be erected in 1891.