To live within the Highland Lakes rural area, an area I’ll roughly bound within Burnet, Llano, and Lampasas counties, is to live on the fringe of a majority society. 83% of Americans in 2025 live in urban areas, and their labor produces 90% of the nation’s GDP. The urban media centers turn their profit seeking gaze to rural Texas only at times of natural calamity, where it can leverage the fearful images of floods and tornadoes to attract consumer eyeballs and advertisers, or to mine the stereotypes of its own creation: a population it sees as the impoverished and pitiable leftovers of the global economy, the political boogeyman of an ascendant right, or the stoic cowboy and the harried prairie woman whose broad skirts conceal endless reserves of resilience.
In 2010 I moved from Burnet to Austin to attend The University of Texas. At each new meeting I would hesitate before answering where I was from, wondering how to contextualize a place at best known to them as a vague dot on the map through which they once drove, or, if they were an outdoorsman, where they may have shot a whitetail deer or hooked a catfish. Sometimes mentioning Liberty Hill, Marble Falls, or Llano would help the urbanite triangulate Burnet, but mostly not.
Some glimmer of recognition was more likely if I was more precise about our home’s location on the shores of Lake Buchanan. The road to our family home first proceeds down soft curvatures in a broad valley until winding more acutely through the sheared cliff faces of limestone and dolomite surrounding Lake Buchanan. The internet at my parents’ home is spotty, the nearest cinema is 30 minutes away in Marble Falls, and the primary local diversion is fishing. The population is relatively old – in the early 1980s Burnet County ranked 70th among all U.S. counties in percentage of residents over age 65 (23%) and the proportion remains roughly the same today – and the opportunities for the young are not nearly as numerous in the cities. I remember my schoolmates often socializing in the parking lot of the 7-11, our version of the mall. Relative isolation provided the context if not the whole explanation for my childhood spent reading and watching movies and playing tennis. It’s hard to regret your past unless you’d rather be someone else.
I and most of the youth I grew up with possessed scant context for our daily life. While we learned the history of America every day, my schooling on local history was restricted to a school trip to Fort Croghan, some vague mentions of initial settlers building the various town squares, and overhead snatches of conversation from worried adults on local crime, drug use, crime, and, most
Community events centered around the school and church and sports. Llano and Lampasas were once a year visits at most. The names given to libraries and streets seemed as intrinsic as space and time. Vandeveer was the street my grade school was on, nothing more. Herman Brown was the name of a library and nothing more until I read Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon B Johnson. (Fun fact: political corruption provided our electricity and library, but that’s another article.)
But change happens, even on the fringes. The population in Burnet County more than doubled during my childhood from 20,000 in 1990 to 42,750 in 2010, now reaching almost 50,000. With the increase in people has come a corresponding increase in things to do, with events and attractions proliferating, especially around Llano, Liberty Hill, and Marble Falls.
Lake Line, doggedly and at times humbly, will promote our community with weekly newsletters outlining community events, video interviews with locals, and business openings.
We will also seek to understand ourselves by illuminating our past. The future, fickle and unknowable, we will leave to the prognosticators and the bone throwers.
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Thank you,
Adam Brandenburg