Buffalo, Texas: Named for the Herds That Were Already Gone

When the International-Great Northern Railroad came through Leon County in the early eighteen seventies, workers named the new depot stop Buffalo, for the great bison herds that had roamed the Central Texas prairies. By then, of course, those herds were rapidly disappearing under the commercial hide-hunting boom that would functionally exterminate the southern buffalo herd within a decade. The town that grew up there did business the railroad had made possible: cotton gins, saloons, general stores, and a milliner.

Before the railroad arrived, local farmers had hauled cotton by river and driven cattle on foot to distant markets. Today Buffalo is the largest community in Leon County, at the junction of Interstate Forty-Five and United States Highway Seventy-Nine.