Pearsall: Tent City on the Railroad, County Seat in a Year

In the eighteen seventies, wagon trains stopped at a water well on a sheep ranch deep in South Texas, a place known as Waggoner's Well. Then the railroad arrived. On February fifteenth, eighteen eighty-two, the International-Great Northern Railroad platted a new townsite around that well and named it Pearsall, after the railroad's vice president, Thomas W. Pearsall.

Prospective buyers arrived by advertised train tours from San Antonio. A tent community sprouted around the depot almost overnight. Within a year, in eighteen eighty-three, residents voted to move Frio County's seat of government here from the older town of Frio City. By eighteen eighty-four, Pearsall had seven hundred residents, twenty businesses, three hotels, three churches, and its own weekly newspaper. It remains the county seat of Frio County today.