Sealy, Texas: Named for the Man Who Slept on It

Sealy, Texas, owes its name to George Sealy, a Galveston financier who helped build the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway through Austin County in the late eighteen seventies. The town was laid out in eighteen seventy-nine when the railroad arrived and grew quickly as a shipping point for cotton.

There is a footnote the chamber of commerce enjoys: a Sealy, Texas cotton gin builder named Daniel Haynes began making cotton-filled mattresses in eighteen eighty-one, and that start eventually grew into the Sealy mattress brand, named directly for this small town. The company started here before moving its manufacturing elsewhere, but the name stuck. Today Sealy is a quiet Austin County city of roughly seven thousand people, best known for that unlikely branding legacy.