Dryden: West Texas Ghost Town on the Sunset Route

Dryden, Texas, in Terrell County, was born from the railroad and has been fading since the railroad's importance diminished. The Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway pushed through here in eighteen eighty-two and named the section stop for Eugene Dryden, the line's chief engineer. Ranching businesses clustered around the tracks, a hotel opened by nineteen twelve, and Army troops camped here during the Mexican border unrest of nineteen thirteen to nineteen seventeen.

Dryden reached a population of nearly a hundred by nineteen twenty-nine. By the late nineteen eighties, only thirteen people remained. The emptiness here is real: Terrell County covers more than two thousand square miles and has fewer than eight hundred residents total.