Alanreed, Texas

Alanreed sits in the Texas Panhandle in Gray County, and its name came straight off a railroad contract. In nineteen hundred a surveyor laid out the townsite for the Choctaw, Oklahoma and Texas Railroad, and the town was reportedly named for the contracting firm, Alan and Reed, whose work pushed the steel west. After the Rock Island line was completed in nineteen oh three, Alanreed became the largest town in Gray County and a major cattle shipping point.

By nineteen twenty-seven, with the Panhandle oil boom and Route Sixty-Six passing through, the population touched around five hundred. The oldest church along Texas Route Sixty-Six still stands here. When Interstate Forty bypassed the town, the traffic vanished and Alanreed shrank to a handful of residents, leaving behind empty storefronts and the oldest church on the Texas stretch of the Mother Road.