La Feria: The Town That Stole Its Depot

The land here was granted by Spain in seventeen seventy-seven to Rosa María Hinojosa de Ballí, one of the great ranchera landowners of colonial Texas. Her family named it La Feria, meaning the fairground, because by the seventeen nineties the hacienda hosted horse racing, fiestas, and other gatherings for the surrounding ranches.

By the early nineteen hundreds, the town of La Feria had grown up on that grant, but the railroad placed its depot a mile away at a stop called Bixby. In July of nineteen twelve, the townspeople solved that problem the only way that seemed reasonable: they hauled the Bixby depot across the prairie to La Feria overnight. The railroad eventually accepted this fait accompli, and La Feria incorporated in nineteen thirty-three as a proper city, its identity rooted in Spanish land grants and a distinctly Texan form of civic initiative.