Palmer, Texas: The Doctor's Town

In eighteen seventy-two the Houston and Texas Central Railway punched south through Ellis County, and the small depot stop it created was named for a man named Palmer tied to the railroad company. Cotton and grain farmers rushed in to use the new shipping point, and within a decade Palmer had two hundred and fifty residents, a hotel, a bank, a school, and two steam cotton gins. Ellis County itself had been organized in eighteen fifty and named for Richard Ellis, the president of the convention that drafted the Texas Declaration of Independence. Palmer never grew into a city, but the railroad name stuck, and the town survives today on the rural southeast edge of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.