Georgetown's Red Poppy Festival, which attracts tens of thousands of visitors annually, is held in April each year on the historic square.

[10] Early American and Swedish pioneers were attracted to the area's abundance of timber and good, clear water.

[14] The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed construction of a dam more than 50 years later, on the north fork of the San Gabriel River, to create and impound Lake Georgetown, which opened officially on October 5, 1979.

[17] Between September 1923 and February 1924, District Attorney Dan Moody led a series of trials against the Ku Klux Klan at the Williamson Country Courthouse.

The trials resulted in five assault convictions against members of the Ku Klux Klan for beating and tarring a white traveling salesman.

It is known locally as the Burkland-Frisk House, as it was built by Leonard Frisk, an early settler in Williamson County, and was later owned by Tony Burkland, a relative.

The Texas-Victorian streetscape was plastered with stucco, aluminum covers, brick, and multiple layers of white paint.

Community leaders began to reassess this retail stock, and work with the Main Street program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation to enhance the architectural heritage of the city.

In this period, economics also began to favor the reuse of historic buildings, as the cost of borrowing money was soaring.

In Georgetown, every bank offered significantly lower interest loans for the renewal of the town's grand Victorian buildings and facades.

Today, Georgetown is home to one of the best-preserved Victorian and pre-WW1 downtown historic districts, with the Beaux-Arts Williamson County Courthouse (1911) as its centerpiece.

Portions of Georgetown are located on either side of the Balcones Escarpment,[23] a fault line in which the areas roughly east of IH-35 are flat and characterized by having black, fertile soils of the Blackland Prairie, and the west side of the escarpment which consists mostly of hilly, karst-like terrain with little topsoil and higher elevations and which is part of the Texas Hill Country.

Inner Space Cavern, a large cave, is a major tourist attraction found on the south side of the city, just west of Interstate 35, and is a large-scale example of limestone karst formations.

[24] Invertebrate species found only in Williamson County live in the cave-like fissures on the west side of Georgetown.

[citation needed] In the 1990s, a small group of concerned landowners and developers formed the Northern Edwards Aquifer Resource Council.

[25] By gaining the permit, these species would be preserved through voluntary donations of land rather than by the county or state requiring setbacks and other involuntary means.

The group documented their successful work in an environmental impact statement to the county in 2002, and a county-wide 10-A permit was obtained in October 2008.

[citation needed] Winters in Georgetown have highs in the 50s and 60s, with a few days dropping near freezing, causing one or two ice storms per season.

The interstate required then-unheard-of 300 feet (91 m) wide of right of way across the entire county and through nearby Taylor farms, and many farmers worried that their homes might get cut off from their fields.

Meanwhile, Round Rock and Georgetown leadership strongly lobbied for a route along the Balcones Escarpment fault line, which would later become U.S. Highway 81 and then eventually I-35.

The economic stimulus, creation of sales tax, banking and investment, and the high rate of community support and volunteerism has had an enormous effect on Georgetown.

[41] Opened in June 1995, Sun City Texas is a 5,300-acre (21 km2) age-restricted community located in Georgetown, about 10 miles west of I-35 on Williams Drive (RM 2338).

It is part of the chain of Sun City communities started by the Del E. Webb Construction Company (now a division of PulteGroup).

[44] Opposition to the project has been vocal at times, especially at the start during the zoning process, with arguments against the size of the community, its effect on Georgetown as a family-oriented town, concerns about the costs of providing city utilities, concern about lowered property taxes fixed for retirees under Texas law, and the disproportionate effect of city voting.

[47] Part of this is because Sun City Texas, a large master-planned community for "active adults 55 and over", calls Georgetown home.

Twenty-five years after the project groundbreaking, Sun City is now home to nearly 16,000 residents and has been a driving force behind growth, development, and the very shape of Georgetown since its inception.

Up to that point, East View High School had started as a freshman-only campus and added on one grade at a time as those students moved up.