Alma, Texas: Named for a Daughter

By eighteen seventy-two the Houston and Texas Central Railway had come through Ellis County, and Alma, Texas, possibly named for the daughter of a local banker, grew up along it. Settlement of the area had actually begun as far back as eighteen forty-eight, with early farmers working the rich Blackland Prairie soil beside a lake called Willow Pond. By nineteen hundred the town had a church, a school, a hundred and fifty residents, and six businesses. Today the town sits on the highway corridor four miles south of Ennis.