Lorena: Named at Auction
Near Waco, Texas
Settlers arrived in the southern McLennan County bottomlands in the eighteen fifties, but the town of Lorena did not take shape until eighteen eighty-one, when the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway pushed its line between Hillsboro and Taylor. Lots were sold along the new line, and the town was named Lorena in honor of Lorena Westbrook, the daughter of a prominent local family. A post office opened in eighteen eighty-two. Lorena sat quietly along the rails for decades before Interstate Thirty-Five absorbed the old highway corridor, putting this small town just thirteen miles southwest of Waco, close enough to the city to grow as a bedroom community while still holding onto its original grid and its borrowed name.
