Katy, Texas: The Town the Railroad Named

Katy's name comes not from a person but from a railroad: the Missouri-Kansas-Texas line, universally called the M-K-T, which everyone shortened to the Katy. When the line came through in the eighteen nineties, the settlement that grew around its depot took the railroad's nickname, by the most common account.

For decades Katy was a modest rice-farming and ranching town. Then Houston began its postwar sprawl westward along I-Ten, and Katy was overtaken by one of the fastest-growing suburban corridors in the United States. The population has grown from roughly twelve thousand in two thousand to nearly twenty-two thousand in the twenty twenty census, though the surrounding unincorporated community adds hundreds of thousands more. The Katy Freeway, I-Ten's local name, was widened to as many as twenty-six lanes counting its frontage roads, believed to be the widest highway in the world, a monument to how thoroughly the old railroad town was swallowed by the city it once stood apart from.