Bastrop Casino History

After independence from Mexico and annexation by the United States, Bastrop County was no longer the ragged edge of the wild frontier. Above all, the railroads brought increased prosperity and culture to Bastrop as they did to most locations across the nation. Troupes of players, singers, and dancers followed the rails from location to location on a performance circuit. Some, like the King and the Duke in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, did not follow a specific circuit or perform particularly well. Music halls and opera houses sprang up across Texas. Most of the opera houses saw little or no opera performed, but the name designated them as a higher level of entertainment than the lowbrow music halls. Bastrop citizens enjoyed one of the earliest performance halls in Texas. …show more content…
Richard Burger, a German immigrant whose house bears a Texas Historical Marker in his honor, was one of the original investors in The Casino. While it doesn't bear a Texas Historical Marker, The Casino is a viable piece of early Texas history and can be seen in Bastrop. A few years later in 1889, two local business men built the Bastrop Opera House, which a Texas Historical Marker honors. During its first year of operation audiences watched "The Mikado" by Gilbert and Sullivan as well as several other plays and shows. Never entirely out of operation, the Bastrop Opera House was the happy recipient of a robust restoration effort which began in 1979. Today it is a successful, well-respected performance center, however