Hutto is obsessed with hippos, not the real sort but the statuary kind. First, you’ve got a 14,900-pound concrete hippo on East Street named Henrietta that cost $2,000. Then there’s Howdy, an eighteen-inch-high concrete hippo weighing 250 pounds that was purchased for $130 and introduced at the town’s Hippo Festival in 2002.

A new herd of hippos hit Hutto in the spring of 2003 when Hutto was officially declared the “Hippo Capital of Texas.” Local businesses ponied up $5,300 for fifty-four concrete hippos that weigh anywhere from 30 to 725 pounds. The squatting, smiling statues can be seen all around Hutto, in front of schools, homes, and businesses.

But the most grandiose of the town’s hippo plans never happened. Hutto’s Hippo Project Group had planned to build a $75,000 hippo named Hugo, which would have been thirty feet tall if you counted the ten-foot base. The hippo would have been the largest in the world, according to Hutto’s former mayor Mike Fowler.

But the suggestion to build the big hippo with sales tax money set off a couple of the town’s City Council members, who didn’t think using public funds would be appropriate for putting up a fifteen-foot-wide, forty-foot-long, twenty-foot-tall, fiberglass-and-steel hippo, possibly on school property, with its own lighting, landscaping, and security measures.

So Hugo never occurred.

But this does not deter Fowler, who keeps seeing hippos on Hutto’s horizon.

“Hugo never happened, but we did deliver a life-size fiberglass hippo to the high school, and we’ve got three more coming,” he said. “But at this point we’re just glad to have one there.”

Legend has it this all started in 1915, when a hippo escaped from a circus train in Hutto and was later found wallowing in mud in Cottonwood Creek, from which the rotund beast was extricated with considerable hubbub. Soon after the incident—the most excitement the town had ever seen—the school adopted the hippopotamus as their mascot.

Hutto got into the hippo statue game over thirteen years ago when the chamber of commerce put up Henrietta—providing a photo opportunity for townspeople and tourists, since she’s equipped with a set of stairs so kids can climb up and sit on her. Henrietta has her own “hippo xing” sign, and she’s so popular that people keep stealing her ears.

Fowler is nuts about the hippo concept. When it was suggested to him that Hutto might put so-called Hippo Humps—speed bumps that would look like the tops of hippo heads with big eyes—in its streets, he said he liked the idea. “Anything that enhances the hippo is something that would be very unique to this community,” he said.

Courtesy of Al Buckner.