Temple, Texas: Born at the Railroad Switch
Near Killeen, Texas
Temple exists because of a railroad decision made in eighteen eighty-one. When the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway laid its tracks through Central Texas, it named a new construction camp Temple Junction after Bernard Moore Temple, the railway's chief engineer. The name stuck, the post office arrived in January eighteen eighty-one, and within three years the settlement had three thousand residents, three churches, a school, and a railroad repair depot that made it a genuine division point.
By the eighteen nineties Temple was a busy railroad division point. That volume of traffic brought commerce, then medicine. In nineteen oh four, two physicians named Arthur Scott and Raleigh White opened a hospital here that grew into one of the premier hospital systems in the American Southwest. Today Baylor Scott and White Medical Center is a major employer in Central Texas. Temple's growth went from mud town to medical hub, all because a railway engineer had a good last name.
