Before the Railroad: Bell County's Older Layers

The community that became Killeen did not begin with the railroad. Palo Alto, two and a half miles northeast of where the tracks would eventually run, was a farming settlement established around eighteen seventy-two, about nine years before Frank Killeen's name appeared on a railroad plat. Bell County itself was formally organized in eighteen fifty and named for Peter Hansborough Bell, the third governor of Texas.

By the time of formal organization, the county already had six hundred white residents and sixty enslaved people, according to the census, the latter number representing the labor economy that central Texas agriculture depended on before the war. Robertson's Colony had brought the first documented Anglo settlers to this river bottom country in eighteen thirty-four and eighteen thirty-five, families who settled in the bottomlands of the Little River. The eighteen thirty-six Runaway Scrape, when settlers fled ahead of the Mexican army following the fall of the Alamo, emptied those farms temporarily.

People came back. The Tonkawa people had lived in this region for generations before any of that, a semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer nation whose territory ranged across what is now Central Texas. By the time Bell County was organized, the Tonkawa had been largely displaced through a combination of conflict, disease, and the relentless pressure of Anglo settlement moving west.

Their presence in the history of this land predates the railroad, the county, the Republic of Texas, and every name on every historical marker by centuries. Killeen sits on that accumulated history. It does not always advertise it.