Palmer

Palmer was settled after the Houston and Texas Central Railway arrived in 1872, and it was named for D. S. Palmer, a Houston physician and a stockholder in the railroad company. It quickly became a shipping point for the cotton and grain of the surrounding farms, a post office branch opened in 1874, and by 1885 the town had 250 residents and twenty-eight businesses, among them a hotel, a bank, a school and two steam gristmills and cotton gins. Before they built churches of their own, the town's four main denominations, the Methodists, the Baptists, the Disciples of Christ and the Cumberland Presbyterians, all worshipped in the Cumberland Presbyterian church. Palmer was incorporated in 1890 and had a weekly paper, the Palmer Times, by 1896.

Another paper, the Palmer Rustler, was founded in 1891 and was merged in 1988 with the Ennis Weekly Local to form the Ellis County News. In 1902 the Palmer Press Brick Company, later the Barron Brick Company, built a plant in the town; Ellis County's clays are valuable for brickmaking, and Ferris, the next town north, became known locally as the brick capital of the nation. On the eve of the First World War Palmer had 750 residents, four churches, two banks, the Rustler and more than forty other businesses. It stayed close to that size for decades, with 758 people in the early 1930s and 601 in the mid 1970s, and then grew, to 1,505 residents in 1988 and 1,774 in 2000.