Dryden

Dryden began in 1882 as a section house, which is the smallest thing a railroad builds that people can live in, and it was named for Eugene E. Dryden, the chief engineer of the line being pushed west across what is now Terrell County. What turned it into a town was cattle rather than track. In 1884 the Pecos Land and Cattle Company made Dryden its headquarters, and by 1886 its manager W. W. Simonds had put up a large frame building for a store and a post office, with two adobe houses alongside for his own family and the Franks family. The store was run by John Abney and the post office opened in 1888. In 1912 Beverly Carter Farley, who had come out in 1889 and by then had a hotel and a store of his own, bought the town's land and gave a piece of it for a school, which served as church and community hall as well. Three separate things then removed the reasons to be there. The Depression took the ranching combines apart. The railroad moved its crews out and closed the depot in the same decade. And the automobile, arriving with roads good enough to use, meant a rancher could reach a real town for supplies instead of the nearest one. Dryden held about fifty people in the early 1930s, recovered to a hundred by the end of the 1940s and stayed there into the early 1960s, then fell away: forty five from the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s, and thirteen by 1988, where it stood for the rest of the century.