Gail Borden's Last Town

Gail Borden made his fortune on condensed milk by solving the problem of food that spoils. In the last years of his life he moved to a Colorado County settlement on Harvey's Creek, built houses on the hills above the water for himself, his sons and his brother John, and renamed the place Bordenville. When the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio railway came through in 1872 he put a hundred and twenty five thousand dollars into the Borden Meat Preserving Company, and the following year opened a slaughterhouse that could handle twenty five head a day, turning out extract of beef, roast beef and beef hash. He also built two schools, one for white children and one for Black children, and sold land at anywhere from five to fifty seven dollars an acre. Borden died at the town that carried his name on 11 January 1874. Eight days later its post office was established, with his brother John as postmaster. His body had already gone north in a private railroad car, to be buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in New York. The meat works did not last. The railroad that had made the plant possible charged more to carry processed meat than live cattle, and the arithmetic killed it. The post office closed in 1905. In the 1930s the highway shifted half a mile south and the businesses followed it, and the state built an impoundment called Borden Lake with a roadside park beside it. When Interstate 10 came through in the late 1950s it took the traffic away again, and the old road became County Road 217. Sixty people lived there in 2000.