Somerville

🏛️The era

In the late 1800s, railroads decided where Texas towns would grow. A line could create a town wherever it laid track, and a town without one could fade away. Across the state, surveyors marked out new townsites along the tracks, and settlers followed.

The Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railway was one of the most important of these Texas lines. It was chartered to link Galveston with the interior, and in the 1880s it became part of the large Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe system. Where two of its branches met in Burleson County, a junction town was a natural next step.

Every mile of those railroads rested on wooden crossties, and ties wore out. Plants that treated ties to make them last longer became steady local industries wherever timber and rail lines came together. Towns competed to attract them.

👥People & events

The town took its name from Albert Somerville, the first president of the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe. Naming a new town after a railroad officer was common in that era. It honored the company that had created the town, and it didn't hurt the town's standing with the railroad.

The townsite was surveyed around 1883, and the first settlers came soon afterward. The post office took a while to settle in and was not permanently established until 1897. That kind of slow start was typical of young railroad towns, which often grew in fits and starts.

The real turning point came in the 1890s. Local citizens persuaded a railroad tie plant to locate here, and Somerville boomed. In 1905 the Santa Fe bought the operation, which tied the town even more closely to the railroad. Tie treating remained an important local industry long afterward.

Somerville incorporated in 1913. In the 1960s, the creation of Lake Somerville gave the town a second identity as a place people come to fish, boat and camp.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Somerville is a textbook American railroad town. It was laid out by a railroad, named for a railroad president, and sustained by railroad work. Thousands of towns across the country began the same way, when the rails determined where people lived, worked and traded.

The tie plant shows a less visible part of that story. The transcontinental and regional rail networks needed an enormous number of wooden ties, and they had to be replaced again and again. Treating them to last longer was a real industry that employed many workers, and towns like Somerville supplied it.

The town's later turn toward recreation also follows a national pattern. In the mid-1900s, federal reservoir projects changed many rural landscapes, and towns that had depended on one industry found new visitors on the shoreline.

🧭If you visit

Start by noticing how the town is laid out. Railroad towns tend to face the tracks, and you can still see how Somerville grew around its rail junction. Watch for trains, too: the railroad's long connection to this place is part of what the marker celebrates.

Then head out to Lake Somerville. Its broad water and parklands draw anglers, campers and boaters, and they show how the town has taken on a second life as a place to relax.

Somerville fits well into a Brazos Valley road trip through small Central Texas towns. It is an easy stop between larger destinations, and it offers the combination of rail history and open water that makes this part of the state enjoyable to drive through.