Mexico's passage of the General Colonization Law in 1825 enabled and encouraged immigration and settlement in unapportioned land. The first recorded land transactions in the Sunset Valley area occurred in 1835, while the region was still under the jurisdiction of the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas. The state apportioned 25 labors of land (roughly equivalent to 4,425 acres (1,791 ha)) to Theodore Bissell and granted a similarly sized partition of land to the north to Thomas Anderson that same year. Located south of Austin, the apportioned land lay outside of the jurisdiction of Stephen F. Austin's colony. Sections of the lands held by Bissell and Anderson were sold to and settled by buyers over the course of subsequent decades following the Annexation of Texas. In the early 1950s, brothers M.H. and Clarence Flournoy acquired a large tract of land 12 mi (19 km) away from Austin, includ…
Founding dates: Wikidata, Wikipedia, the U.S. post office records of Blevins & Helbock (CC0) and the Census. Homes by year built: Census ACS 2020–24. National Register of Historic Places: National Park Service (list of May 22, 2026). Old photos, postcards and papers: Wikimedia Commons, the Library of Congress and other public archives, credited on each item’s page. Maps: U.S. Geological Survey historical topographic maps (via Esri) and Sanborn fire-insurance maps (Library of Congress). History text and census tables: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0). Places that used to be: USGS Geographic Names Information System (2021). How TownRatings grades history →
From Wikimedia Commons (6), Wikipedia and the USGS Geographic Names Information System. Archive images are copied here with their credits and licenses, shown on each photo’s page. Refreshed monthly.
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