Jarrell: Named for a Real Estate Man, Remembered for a Tornado

Jarrell, in Williamson County, did not exist until December of nineteen oh nine, when the Bartlett and Western Railway laid track through the area and the first lot sold in the new town site. It was named for Orlando D. Jarrell, a Temple real estate broker who helped facilitate the development.

By nineteen fourteen the town had reached five hundred residents and boasted a waterworks, electric lights, a movie theater, and a hotel. Then the cotton market collapsed in the nineteen twenties and the Bartlett and Western shut down in nineteen thirty-five. Jarrell shrank for decades.

The town made national headlines again on May twenty-seventh, nineteen ninety-seven, when an F-five tornado tore a roughly five mile path through the community, killing twenty-seven people and destroying the Double Creek Estates neighborhood entirely. It remains one of the most powerful tornadoes ever recorded in Texas.