Kress, Texas

Kress started as Wright, named for a local rancher and preacher who ran a store and post office on the stage line from Canyon to Plainview beginning around eighteen ninety. When the Pecos and Northern Texas Railway came through Swisher County in nineteen oh six, the post office and store relocated two miles southwest to the new rail stop and took a new name: Kress, honoring another pioneer settler, George H. Kress.

This is a thoroughly ordinary Texas Panhandle origin story, and that ordinariness is the point. Every town along this stretch of the Llano Estacado has a version of the same tale: a pre-railroad community, a railroad bypass or arrival, a relocation, a renaming. Kress just did it with particular neatness.