Brenham's historic downtown surrounds the courthouse square and the four blocks of Main and Alamo Streets either side of it. Roughly fifty buildings — most from the 1870s to the 1920s — make up a National Register district that has been carefully preserved and quietly reinvented as antique shops, boutiques, coffee bars and small restaurants.
It is a pleasant walking grid for an afternoon: cast-iron storefronts, faded ghost signs from earlier Brenham businesses, the restored Simon Theatre and the Brenham Heritage Museum housed in the old Federal Building. Weekend evenings bring out the local crowd; weekdays it is sleepier but every shop is open. The district is also where Brenham's Czech and German heritage shows through most clearly — several bakeries still make kolaches and stollen by old family recipes.