Ballinger: Six Thousand at the Land Sale

When the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway pushed west out of Brownwood in eighteen eighty-six, it chose a new townsite in Runnels County with a superior water supply. Newspapers across Texas advertised the lot sale, and six thousand people showed up on June twenty-ninth, eighteen eighty-six to bid on property in a town that barely existed yet. That kind of frontier real-estate fever made Ballinger the commercial center of Runnels County almost overnight.

The older county seat of Runnels City, five miles to the north, tried to win the railroad terminus and failed, then lost its county seat status to Ballinger by eighteen eighty-eight. The town was named for William Pitt Ballinger, a Galveston attorney who held stock in the railroad. It sits today at the junction of US Eighty-Three and US Sixty-Seven, still the beating heart of a wool, mohair, and cattle country.