Blanket, Texas: Named for a Rainstorm

The small community of Blanket, ten miles northeast of Brownwood, carries one of the more unusual place names in Texas. In eighteen fifty-two, surveyors came upon a band of Tonkawa people caught in a downpour near a creek. The Tonkawa had draped their blankets over sumac bushes for shelter. The surveyors named the creek for what they saw. The name transferred to the community that grew along its banks two decades later.

Pinkney Anderson established a store and became the first postmaster when a post office was opened in eighteen seventy-five. When the Fort Worth and Rio Grande Railroad extended its line from Comanche to Brownwood in eighteen ninety-one, the town physically relocated to meet it, moving to the present site near the tracks. Blanket today has a population of roughly three hundred seventy people, a quiet farming community in Brown County whose name outlasted the railroad that once made it relevant.