Baird, Texas

Baird owes its name to a railroad director. When the Texas and Pacific Railway pushed through Callahan County in eighteen eighty, company officials named the new stop after Matthew Baird, one of the railway's directors. The town became a division point on the line, meaning it got a depot, a roundhouse, and repair shops, which gave it a stability that purely speculative railroad towns often lacked.

The Texas and Pacific even built an Immigrant House here, a place where newly arrived families could stay while scouting land to buy. By the mid-eighteen eighties the population had reached twelve hundred. In eighteen eighty-three, Baird absorbed most of the residents of Belle Plain, the previous county seat, when voters moved the seat of Callahan County to the new railroad town.