Brady: Heart of Texas

Brady sits at a precise geographic distinction: McCulloch County, where it serves as county seat, is the geographical center of Texas. That makes Brady the Heart of Texas, and the town has leaned into the title hard enough to put it on the water tower. The county was organized in eighteen seventy-six and named for Ben McCulloch, a Texas Ranger and Confederate general.

Brady Creek provided the site when Henry and Nancy Fulcher donated land for the townsite in the mid-eighteen seventies. The first stone courthouse was complete by eighteen seventy-eight, and the town's first newspaper, the Brady Sentinel, launched in eighteen eighty. What drove early growth was the same thing driving every West Texas town: cattle.

Local ranchers trailed herds to Kansas markets through the eighteen seventies and eighties before the Fort Worth and Rio Grande Railway arrived in nineteen oh three and made long drives unnecessary.