West, Texas: Czech Stop of the Known World
Near Waco, Texas
The town of West, Texas is not west of anything in particular. It was named in eighteen eighty-one for T. M.
West, a local businessman and postmaster, and it sits on the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad in McLennan County. What made it distinctive was Czech immigration. Beginning in the eighteen eighties, Czech families poured into the area around West, buying farmland and opening European-style businesses, and over the following decades the town developed one of the largest concentrations of Czech Texans anywhere in the state.
In nineteen ninety-seven the Texas Legislature officially recognized West as home of the Official Kolache of Texas. The Village Bakery, founded in nineteen fifty-two by the Montgomery family, became the spiritual center of that identity, and the Czech Stop kolache shop on Interstate Thirty-Five has for decades been a mandatory pull-off for anyone driving between Dallas and Austin. The kolache is the town's real monument.
