The Corridor: Killeen, Temple, and the Military Region

Temple, about twenty-seven miles to the east, was also a railroad town, also founded by the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe, also named for a railroad engineer. Bernard Moore Temple was the railway's chief civil engineer; his name went on the town when the post office opened in January eighteen eighty-one, a year before the tracks reached Killeen. The two cities grew up together, linked by the same iron rails, serving the same agricultural hinterland, separated by enough distance to develop distinct identities before Fort Hood arrived and remade the entire region.

The Killeen-Temple-Fort Hood metropolitan statistical area now holds roughly half a million people. Temple became a hospital city, home to Baylor Scott and White and a medical infrastructure that drew patients from across Central Texas. Killeen became the soldier city, the housing market and commercial strip that served the base.

Copperas Cove, incorporated in nineteen thirteen and revived by the nineteen forty-two Army contract the same way Killeen was, became the third city in the corridor, smaller, quieter, immediately adjacent to the installation's western gate. What connects them is not just the highway or the railroad right-of-way. It is the peculiar civic culture of a military region: the familiarity with deployment cycles and homecomings, with the grief of casualties and the readjustment of veterans, with a population that turns over every three years as orders come and families pack.

The permanence is institutional. The people are always passing through. Killeen has made a life of that paradox for more than eighty years.