Transportation

Port Lavaca, TX

When merchant C. U. Yancy built the Beach Hotel in 1904, it was the tallest building in Port Lavaca, a beacon for a coastal town courting tourists. Special excursion trains carried vacationers down from San Antonio and other inland cities to enjoy the Gulf, while traveling salesmen lodged in its rooms and townsfolk gathered in its dining hall. For generations it was the social heart of the community.

Sabine Pass, TX

Long before pavement, this Gulf Coast corridor linking Sabine Pass toward Galveston carried Native people, early settlers, traders, cattlemen, and Republic of Texas mail riders along the open shore. Confederate troops knew it as the "Road from Galveston," and in the 1920s Commissioner W.A. Vaughan rebuilt it with coastal shell, touching off a beachfront tourism boom. Folded into State Highway 87 in 1931, the route later aided World War II coastal defense before repeated hurricanes forced its closure in 1989.

Borger, TX

Edward Fitzgerald "Ned" Beale packed several careers into one 19th-century life: naval officer, general, explorer, diplomat, and frontiersman who fought at San Pasqual and carried early California gold east. In the 1850s he surveyed a southern wagon road toward Los Angeles, and the Texas Panhandle formed the crucial link tying the eastern trails to the West. Earlier paths blazed by Josiah Gregg and Randolph Marcy fed into the same corridor, which in the 20th century became Route 66 and then Interstate 40.

Beasley, TX

Beasley grew up along the Texas & New Orleans Railroad in the 1890s, first named for Isabel Dyer before taking its founder's name when the post office opened in 1898. A 1910 land-auction boom drew German and Czech families from Washington County, and the town quickly gained stores, cotton gins, a hotel, and churches. It incorporated in 1970 and still anchors the surrounding farm country.

Nye County, NV

Beatty grew into the hub of three short-lived "gold" railroads spawned by the early-1900s strikes at Tonopah, Goldfield, and Rhyolite—boosters even dubbed it the "Chicago of the West." Between 1906 and 1907 the Las Vegas and Tonopah, the Bullfrog Goldfield, and the Tonopah and Tidewater railroads all reached through the area, converging on the boom camps. The rush proved fleeting, and the rails at Beatty were finally torn up beginning in July 1942.

Beaumont, TX

Settled in 1825 as Tevis Bluff and incorporated as Beaumont in 1838, this Jefferson County seat grew as a riverboat port and center for lumber, rice, and ranching. Everything changed near here in 1901 with the Spindletop gusher, which turned oil into a modern industry and remade Beaumont into a hub of ports, shipyards, and petrochemical works. Few Texas towns pivoted so completely from frontier trading post to industrial powerhouse.

Beaumont, TX

Ringed by pine forest, Beaumont was a lumber town from its founding, marking one square on its original plat as "Steam Mill Square." From Lucien Hopson's 1840 saw pit floating logs down a canal, the industry grew through hand-powered shingle mills, then steam mills in the 1850s, and after the ruin of the Civil War a dense thicket of companies powered the city's recovery. Tycoon John Henry Kirby bought up several mills around 1900, but by the 1920s the surrounding forests were exhausted and the city mills gave way to operations deep in the woods.

Bedford, PA · est. 1982

One of Pennsylvania's oldest western counties, Bedford was formed in 1771 and once stretched across much of the state's frontier. In 1758, during the French and Indian War, Fort Bedford rose here as a key link in the British campaign against the French, and the Forbes Road was cut through the wilderness to reach the Ohio country. That military road became one of the great early highways carrying settlers and commerce west.

Lumpkin, GA

Built in 1836 by Dr. Bryan N. Bedingfield as a family home and stagecoach stop, this inn stood a day's travel from Columbus, Americus, Fort Gaines, and Eufaula, making it a hub of commerce and community life. Known over the years by several family names, it served as a hotel or boarding house into the 1930s before being restored as an 1840s house museum.

Schulenburg, TX

Built in 1888 by the King Iron Bridge Company of Cleveland with a Kansas subcontractor, this sixty-foot iron span carried the Old Praha Road across Mulberry Creek and opened easy access to the growing town of Schulenburg. A pin-connected, box-chord modified Pratt low truss — the "bedstead" type — it cost just $1,422 to erect and served a major travel route into the early twentieth century. Few bridges of its distinctive style still stand.

Pettus, TX

Carved largely from San Patricio County in 1857 and organized in 1858, Bee County took its name from Barnard E. Bee, who served the Republic of Texas as secretary of war, secretary of state, and minister to the United States. A cattle region since Spanish colonial times, it became an important beef producer after 1865 and gained its first railroad, the San Antonio and Aransas Pass, in 1886. Oil was discovered here in 1929, and the county seat has been at Beeville since 1860.

Beeville, TX

Beeville got its first post office in 1859, but the 1918 Classical Revival building — with its Doric portico, fanlight doorway, and brick parapet — was the first raised on federal ground. During its construction a feud between two dirt-hauling contractors turned deadly: in 1917 Robert B. Brown shot and killed J. P. Hermes, who had come at him with a knife. Brown's conviction was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in an opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that helped establish the right to meet a lethal threat with lethal force.

Kerrville, TX

When the San Antonio & Aransas Pass Railroad made Kerrville its last stop, San Antonio lumberman Frank J. Beitel bought land here in 1889 to open a lumberyard, betting on the county's timber and coming growth. The business thrived, expanding into a warehouse, retail building, and lumber shed, and gained its own rail spur for loading goods after the town's depot was rebuilt in the 1910s. For more than a century the yard supplied the materials that built Kerrville.

Asherton, TX

Designed by noted San Antonio architect Alfred Giles and built in 1910, Bel-Asher was the home of Asher Richardson and his wife Mary Isabelle, whose combined names christened the house. Richardson founded the town of Asherton and routed his Asherton and Gulf Railway Co. through it in 1905, tying the community into the wider rail network. Built of native sandstone with prairie-school influences and broad projecting eaves, the house has stayed in the family for generations and was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1990.

San Antonio, TX

Laid down in 1914 in San Antonio's Monte Vista district, Belknap Place is the oldest surviving concrete street in Texas and a landmark of early road engineering. It used a patented two-layer "granitoid" process, developed in the wake of the nation's first concrete street in Bellefontaine, Ohio, that has let the pavement endure a century without major repair. Its stamped brick surface even gave horseshoes a non-slip grip — a telling detail from the moment when horse traffic was giving way to the automobile.

East Columbia, TX

Established in 1823 as a Brazos River landing for Josiah H. Bell's plantation, this spot grew into the town of Marion—later East Columbia—laid out in 1824. During the Texas Revolution it served as an army enlistment point and ferrying dock, and in the years of the Republic it thrived as a key river port and trade center. The Brazos was then a highway, and landings like this one were its ports.

Bellaire, TX

In 1908, land-company president William Wright Baldwin founded Bellaire on part of a former ranch once owned by Rice University benefactor William Marsh Rice. He carved truck farms out of the prairie and platted Bellaire — advertised to Midwestern farmers as "Good Air" for its gulf breezes — as an exclusive residential and trading center linked to Houston by an electric streetcar line. Incorporated in 1918 and engulfed by Houston's growth by 1949, Bellaire nonetheless kept its independence and its own city government.

Bellaire, TX

In the streetcar age, the suburb of Bellaire was stitched to Houston by rail. Developer William Wright Baldwin's Westmoreland Railroad began building an electric line down the esplanade of Bellaire Boulevard in 1909, and service to a waiting pavilion and turnaround loop here opened in December 1910. Nicknamed the "Toonerville Trolley," the line carried commuters until worn-out track and the rise of automobiles ended it in 1927—replaced the very next day by motor buses.

Baird, TX

Belle Plaine's residents were burying their dead here by 1878, the oldest marked grave belonging to sixteen-year-old Virgil Hill. The little community's fate turned on the railroad: when the Texas & Pacific rerouted its line through nearby Baird in 1883 instead of Belle Plaine, the town began to wither, and the railway deeded the graveyard to Callahan County the following year. Though the town had all but vanished by 1909, burials of area pioneers and veterans continued.

Jasper, TX

In 1910, as railroads and traveling salesmen crisscrossed East Texas, Mamie Cornellia Neyland Patten built this hotel in the Piney Woods town of Jasper and named it for her daughters Belle and "Miss Jim." A widow raising four children active in civic life, she ran a respectable establishment that drew commercial travelers, and after her death her daughter carried on for decades. From the 1930s the building even housed the town's Western Union telegraph office, a lifeline of long-distance communication.

Bellefonte, PA · est. 1969

On December 18, 1918, this field hosted the first stop on the inaugural scheduled westbound air mail flight, flown by pilot Leon D. Smith. Chosen by pioneer aviator Max Miller, the site sat amid the ridges of central Pennsylvania — a crucial and treacherous waypoint for early pilots crossing the Alleghenies. It remained in regular air mail service until 1925, when advancing routes and aircraft moved on.

Mineral County, NV

Founded in 1874 by Alsop J. Holmes, Belleville sprang up to mill ore from his Northern Belle Mine at Candelaria, shipping its first bullion bar in 1875. When the Carson and Colorado Railroad reached town in 1881, Belleville's population peaked near five hundred, supporting hotels, restaurants, a schoolhouse, and seven saloons. But once pipelines carried water directly to Candelaria's own mills in the late 1880s, the town lost its purpose and stood deserted by 1892.

Bellville, GA

Bellville was founded in 1890 on land platted beside the newly laid tracks of the Savannah & Western Railroad and named for pioneer Frances Bell Smith. Its depot quickly became the town's commercial and social center, and Bellville grew into a regional shipping point for cotton, naval stores, and lumber, home as well to the Bellville Academy.

Bellville, TX

Brothers Thomas and James Bell arrived with Austin's colony in 1822, and by 1846 Thomas's land offer won Bellville the county seat over old San Felipe. Settlers from England, Germany and across the eastern states poured in, and after the hard Reconstruction years the Santa Fe railroad's 1880 arrival doubled the population. Cotton, and later a 1915 oil strike, kept the town thriving through the twentieth century.

Belpre, OH

When New England pioneers laid out Belpre on the north bank of the Ohio in 1789, they were among the first waves of settlers pushing into the newly organized Northwest Territory, farming the rich bottomland and trading along the river highway that carried people and goods west. The settlement was well enough established by the early 1800s to greet the Lewis and Clark expedition as it made its way downriver toward the frontier. A century later the same current that floated flatboats of grain was harnessed by locks and dams, and barge traffic turned the old farm town into a working industrial river port.

Maydelle, TX

Long before bridges spanned the Neches River, Native people and early Anglo settlers forded it here at Duty Crossing, named for settler Richard Duty. By 1848 Ben Cannon was running a ferry at the site, a vital link in regional travel until a toll bridge took over the traffic in 1854. The crossing marks a spot where the routes of river, road, and eventually the Texas State Railroad all converged.

San Angelo, TX

When a catastrophic flood swept away the town of Ben Ficklin on August 24, 1882, it inundated the settlement's cemetery and exposed many graves. Charles B. Metcalfe chose this higher ground to reinter his relatives—including Col. Francis C. Taylor, the town's founder—and to bury his mother, sister, and uncle among the flood's victims. The site became the resting place of many Tom Green County pioneers, in a village and cemetery named for Ben Ficklin, owner of the San Antonio–El Paso mail line.

Athens, GA

A self-taught mechanic and inventor, Ben T. Epps designed, built, and flew the first airplane in Georgia in 1907 — just four years after the Wright brothers. From his Athens shop he built a series of ever-lighter monoplanes, including a 1924 model weighing just 350 pounds and powered by a motorcycle engine, and he opened an airfield here in 1917. He died in 1937 from a crash on takeoff at this very field.

Ben Wheeler, TX

First known as Clough for the settler who bought the land in 1868 and opened a post office in his home, this East Texas community was renamed Ben Wheeler in honor of a Kentucky-born mail carrier — the first to bring the mail into Van Zandt County. The town grew quickly in the 1880s and early 1890s, boasting general stores, gins, mills, hotels, churches, and the Alamo Institute, before a series of fires and shifting fortunes slowed its growth. It stabilized in the mid-twentieth century as area farmers turned to ranching and haying.

Grand Saline, TX

Born in Kentucky in 1818, Benjamin Franklin Wheeler spent years as a Mississippi River boatman before settling in Van Zandt County, Texas, in the late 1840s. He became one of the first mail carriers in the region, riding routes between Tyler, Edom, and Canton, helped improve the Shreveport–Dallas road, and carried mail for the Confederacy during the Civil War. In 1876 a friend's request for a post office produced the community of Ben Wheeler, named in his honor.

Ravenna Township, OH

Benjamin Tappan arrived in the wooded Connecticut Western Reserve in 1799 and laid out Ravenna Township while northeastern Ohio was still raw frontier, barely settled by Americans pushing west of the Alleghenies. Over a long public life he wore many hats—militia officer during the War of 1812, state judge, and U.S. senator—while helping steer the canal boom that stitched Ohio's farms to eastern markets. His most lasting mark was national: in 1844 he shepherded the legislation that turned James Smithson's mysterious bequest into the Smithsonian Institution.

Dudley, MA

Beresik Square honors Stephen E. Beresik, a young sailor from the mill town of Dudley, Massachusetts, who became the community's first resident killed in World War II. He died on August 9, 1942, aboard the heavy cruiser USS Quincy, which was sunk that night in the ferocious Battle of Savo Island off Guadalcanal — one of the U.S. Navy's costliest surface defeats of the Pacific war. Barely twenty-three, Beresik was among the hundreds lost when Japanese warships caught the Allied fleet by surprise in the war's early, uncertain months. His hometown answered that loss by naming a public square in his memory.

Rio Rancho, NM

Bernalillo sits along the old Camino Real in the Rio Grande valley, on ground once part of the Pueblo province of Tiguex. Coronado's expedition wintered here in 1540–42 during its search for the fabled Cities of Cíbola, an occupation that brought violent conflict with the region's Pueblo peoples. The town that grew nearby became a stop on the royal road linking Mexico City to Santa Fe.

Galveston, TX

Virginia-born Bernard Moore Temple served in the Confederate army before heading west to build a career in civil engineering. As chief engineer for the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railroad in the early 1880s, he oversaw much of the line's expansion across Texas and insisted on quality construction, and the railroad town of Temple, Texas, was named in his honor in 1881. This marker commemorates the engineer whose work helped stitch the state together by rail.

Bertram, TX

Bertram was born in 1882 when the Austin and Northwestern Railroad ran its line through the area, drawing residents — and even whole buildings — from the older settlement of South Gabriel two miles away. Named for Austin merchant Rudolph Bertram, who helped finance the railroad, the town became an agricultural marketing hub, booming during World War I before Depression and changing transportation slowed its growth. It remains a farming community whose founders' descendants still live nearby.

Bertram, TX

When the railroad reached this spot in 1882, the new town of Bertram raised one of its first buildings as a combined school, Sunday school, and Masonic hall—seeded by a $50 gift from the railroad executive it was named for. By 1909 a booming cotton economy had swelled enrollment past 260 students, prompting a handsome two-story brick schoolhouse. In its early years children often skipped the first weeks of class to pick cotton in the fields.

McAllen, TX

In the mid-1800s, steamboats owned by shipping magnates Mifflin Kenedy and Richard King moved goods and people up and down the Rio Grande. The steamboat Bessie was the last of that fleet, and instead of a whistle she carried this 400-pound bell. After her final voyage in 1902 the bell served on a plantation, survived a church fire, was cracked and recast, and eventually found a home at St. Joseph the Worker Church in McAllen.

Killeen, TX

Bethel Primitive Baptist Church began around 1864 in the Palo Alto community northeast of present Killeen, sharing a Union Church building with other denominations. When the Gulf, Colorado, and Santa Fe Railroad cut through Bell County in 1882, the new town of Killeen drew Palo Alto's residents away, and by 1889 the congregation had relocated to this site. Its steep gable roof, Gothic-detailed doors, and lintel-capped windows make it likely the oldest church building in Killeen.

Whitney, TX

In 1879 farmers and businessmen founded the Bethlehem community, church, and cemetery beside the new town of Whitney, drawing families who wanted to be near the Houston & Texas Central rail line. The first burial came in 1880, and for generations residents chose these grounds or reinterred loved ones here. When the church closed after 1919, its land passed to the cemetery, which a community association has tended ever since.

Jasper, TX

On the Angelina River, Bevilport became the seat of the Bevil municipality in 1834 and a busy inland shipping point, its docks crowded with flatboats and keelboats carrying cotton, hides, and other East Texas goods downriver to New Orleans. It took its name from John Bevil, a Texas Ranger, delegate to the 1835 Consultation on Texas independence, and later chief justice of Jasper County. Like many river towns, it thrived on the rich bottomlands and the water route to market.

Frankfort, KY

In 1786 the English boatbuilder John Instone settled on this Frankfort street—naming it Wapping Street for a district of London—to build river vessels for General James Wilkinson's Ohio Valley trade. Decades later John B. Bibb, a War of 1812 veteran and state legislator, built the present house in 1845 and cultivated the tender, sweet Bibb lettuce that still bears his name.

Nye County, NV

Named for its smoky-blue distances, Big Smokey Valley lies in Shoshone country between the Toiyabe and Toquima ranges and saw a procession of Western legends pass through. Jedediah Smith crossed in 1827 and John C. Frémont, with Kit Carson, came in 1845; by 1859 the valley carried the Jackass Mail, Pony Express, Overland Telegraph, and Overland stagecoaches. Silver strikes at Austin in the 1860s sparked its first mining boom, dotting the ranges with camps like Ophir Canyon and Jefferson. The Tonopah strike of 1900 revived the rush and gave rise to Manhattan and Round Mountain.

Village of Sodus Point, NY

Perched where Sodus Bay meets Lake Ontario, this lighthouse was built in 1870 to guide schooners and steamers safely into one of the lake's best natural harbors. From 1871 to 1901 its beam warned mariners off the rocky point during the busy era when Great Lakes shipping carried grain, lumber, coal, and passengers along New York's northern shore. The stone tower and keeper's dwelling stand as a reminder of the lonely, essential work of the lightkeepers who tended the flame.

Dallas, TX

Before Dallas had public transit on its west side, Victor Bilbo filled the gap with a fleet of Model T Fords. Beginning in 1915, his jitney line carried nickel-a-ride passengers — packed three deep, some clinging to the running boards — from downtown out to Cement City, Irving, and other fringe communities, and he often ferried people to hospitals and funerals free of charge. New state franchise laws finally replaced his jitneys with buses in 1927.

San Diego, CA

This San Diego waterway honors Bill Muncey, one of the most dominant figures in the roaring, spray-flinging world of unlimited hydroplane racing. From the 1950s until his death in a 1981 race, Muncey piloted thunderous, aircraft-engined boats to a record heap of victories, becoming the sport's most celebrated champion. Mission Bay was a favored venue for these high-speed regattas that drew huge crowds along the California coast.

Streetman, TX

Birdston grew up around the general store V. I. Bird opened in the 1860s, and because cotton ruled the local economy, a gin soon followed. Sited at the halfway point on the Fairfield–Corsicana road, the community gained a post office in 1866, a school by 1867, and a shared church by 1872, while its cemetery began with the grave of a child who fell ill while her family was traveling through. When the railroad bypassed the town in 1909, its businesses and post office faded, though the cemetery endures.

Birome, TX

Founded in 1910 as one of five International and Great Northern Railway stops in southern Hill County, Birome grew up as a shipping point for the surrounding farms. Its unusual name honors Bickham and Jerome Cartwright, descendants of the settler Matthew Cartwright, whose 1856 land patent had taken in the future townsite. The little community shows how the railroad, more than anything, decided where Texas towns would rise.

Seven Valleys, PA · est. 2012

In 1851 C. Jacob Fussell built a factory near here to turn the surplus milk and cream of York County's dairy farmers into ice cream—the first time the treat was mass-produced for commercial sale in the United States. The nearby Northern Central Railroad carried his product straight to the Baltimore market. After Fussell relocated to Baltimore, local makers kept the trade alive into the 1940s.

Anahuac, TX

Ross Shaw Sterling rose from a Chambers County farm boy to one of Texas's great oil-and-industry figures, building two wells into the Humble Oil & Refining Company and later shaping Houston through real estate and the newspaper that became the Houston Post. As governor from 1931 to 1933 he steered the state through the depths of the Great Depression, pushing agricultural relief and famously placing oil counties under martial law to enforce production limits. He lost his fortune, then rebuilt it, dying in 1949 as head of new enterprises and a noted philanthropist.

Etna, CA

This marker notes the 1902 birthplace of Randolph Collier, who went on to serve nearly four decades in the California State Senate. Etna, a small town in the Scott Valley of far-northern California, was a world away from the freeway-building boom Collier would later champion in Sacramento. His long tenure spanned the mid-twentieth century, an era when California remade itself around the automobile and the modern highway.

Miami Beach, FL

Near this spot once stood the Biscayne House of Refuge, part of the chain of lifesaving stations that guarded Florida's lonely Atlantic beaches in the late nineteenth century. After every storm, its keeper and his family would walk the shore searching for castaways, offering food, dry clothing, and shelter to those the sea had spared. On a coast then largely empty of settlement, such a station was often the only hope of survival for a shipwrecked sailor.

Bishop, TX

F. Z. Bishop founded this town in 1910 on land bought from the Driscoll Ranch, staking it on both sides of the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico railroad and dreaming of a model city on the prairie. He designed a uniform brick business district, planted 600 palm trees, laid miles of sidewalks, and planned a park with a lake and band pavilion; the town reached 1,000 residents within two years and incorporated in 1912. Though Bishop went bankrupt in 1916, the community endured, and mid-century oil and gas discoveries pushed petroleum past agriculture as its economic base.

Monterey County, CA

This marker commemorates the designation of Route One through Monterey County — from the Carmel River south to the county line — as California's first officially recognized scenic highway. Winding along dramatic Big Sur cliffs and spanning the iconic Bixby Creek Bridge, this stretch of coast road was deliberately preserved for its beauty by county and state action. It set a precedent for protecting scenic corridors as public treasures.

Oxford Township, OH · est. 2001

Spanning Four Mile Creek in Butler County, the Black (Pugh's Mill) Covered Bridge was raised in 1868–69 by master builders who joined two different truss systems—Childs and Long—inside one roof, a rare engineering marriage. Originally a single arched span of more than 200 feet, it was cleverly re-engineered the next year by slackening iron rods to lower the deck onto a new central pier, splitting one span into two. It remains among the longest and most ambitious of Ohio's surviving covered bridges.

York, PA · est. 1949

When York was surveyed and laid out in 1741 under the proprietorship of William Penn's sons, Baltzer Spengler was rewarded for his work on the town plan with this very lot. In time an old tavern rose on the spot, one of the gathering places that gave the young town its social and civic life. Taverns like this were the crossroads of colonial Pennsylvania, where travelers rested and townsfolk traded news.

Oran, TX

Founded before the Civil War around a reliable spring, Black Springs grew into the leading town of Palo Pinto County on the strength of the North Texas cattle country around it. Its story brushes against legends of the range — trail drivers Oliver Loving and Charles Goodnight and the frontier veteran J. J. "Jack" Cureton all figure in the area's early days. Renamed Oran in 1886 to honor Governor Oran M. Roberts, the town supported stores, churches, a school, and a railroad before fading in the 1930s and 1940s.

Esmeralda County, NV

When the Pittsburgh-Silver Peak Gold Mining Company bought up the major mines in 1906 and found land speculators had cornered nearby Silver Peak, it simply surveyed its own townsite to the north and named it Blair. The company built a 100-stamp mill in 1907 and ran a 17½-mile railroad from Blair Junction to the Tonopah & Goldfield main line. Yet the boom was brief: by 1920 Blair was all but deserted, leaving stone-building remnants and mill foundations as its only survivors.

Hollidaysburg, PA · est. 1982

Formed in 1846 and named for the prominent citizen John Blair, this county sits in the Allegheny highlands with Hollidaysburg as its seat. Its fortunes were transformed by the coming of the railroad: the city of Altoona, founded in 1849, grew into one of the great railroad centers of America. There the Pennsylvania Railroad built vast shops that employed generations of workers.

Johnson City, TX

From this Blanco County headquarters in the 1870s, brothers J. T. and Sam Ealy Johnson launched thousands of cattle up the trails to Kansas railheads, gathering and processing herds at pens on Williamson's and Deer creeks. Theirs was the largest trail-driving outfit across Blanco and six neighboring counties, sending north herds of 2,500 to 3,000 head each season. Younger brother Sam Ealy Johnson would become grandfather to President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Blanket, TX

Local tradition says Blanket Creek got its name in 1852, when surveyors found a band of Tonkawa hunters drying their rain-soaked blankets on the sumac bushes. Permanent settlement followed in the 1870s around a general store and post office, and Blanket became a stop on the Brownwood-to-Fort Worth stagecoach line before the Fort Worth and Rio Grande Railway arrived in 1891 and prompted a whole new townsite. Sustained by cotton gins and a doctor who served for more than sixty years, the town incorporated in 1912 and has endured droughts and downturns ever since.