The Railroad Name: How Killeen Got Its Town

Before there was a town here, there was a surveyor's grid and a railroad's ambition. In the spring of eighteen eighty-one, the first locomotive of the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway rolled into what had been open Bell County prairie, carrying perhaps forty people to a settlement that had not existed six months before. The railroad's planners had purchased three hundred sixty acres approximately two and a half miles southwest of an older farming community called Palo Alto, laid out a seventy-block grid, and needed a name.

They chose Frank P. Killeen, the railroad's assistant general manager, a bureaucrat whose footprint on this ground was otherwise invisible but whose name would outlast him by a century and a half. The Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe itself was a creature of ambition, chartered in eighteen seventy-three to connect Galveston to Santa Fe, New Mexico, sidestepping Houston's trade monopoly.

It never reached New Mexico, but it stitched central Texas together, founding Temple to the south as a division point, carrying Galveston newspapers to the interior on the first daily newspaper train in the country. In Killeen's case, the railroad arrived before the people. Within a year there was a depot, a school, a saloon, two cotton gins, a lumberyard, and a blacksmith shop.

By eighteen eighty-four the population reached three hundred fifty. For the next sixty years Killeen remained what the railroad made it: a market town for cotton, wool, and grain. The First National Bank opened in nineteen oh one.

Electric lighting arrived in nineteen oh four. A water system came online in nineteen fourteen, by which point the population had reached about thirteen hundred, a size the town held for roughly the next two decades. Then the War Department looked at the map.