History
Baxter's Curve
Baxter's Curve is a bend in the railway roughly midway between Dryden and Sanderson, and it is where one of the last major train robberies in West Texas went wrong for the men attempting it. Just after midnight on 13 March 1912, Ben Kilpatrick and Ole Hobek boarded Southern Pacific train number nine at Dryden, put on masks once the town was behind them, and took the engineer and crew hostage.
History
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.
History
Strawbridge
Sanderson was called Strawbridge first, and not after the man who founded it. Charlie Wilson, an ex soldier and saloon keeper, set up where the Southern Pacific surveyors had marked a division point in 1881, the sort of place a railroad needs every hundred miles or so to change crews and service engines. The name on it, though, was the railroad's from the beginning: J. H.
History
The 1965 Flood
Sanderson is built in the mouth of a canyon, which is convenient for a railroad and dangerous for everything else. On the morning of 11 June 1965, after as much as nine inches of rain had fallen on the watershed above the town in two days, a fifteen foot wall of water came down Sanderson Canyon at about five past seven and went through the town.
Industry & Science
The Mohair Country
Almost nothing grows on this country that a person can eat, and for most of the twentieth century that fact made Terrell County a place for sheep and Angora goats. The Angora is the animal that made the Edwards Plateau and the Trans Pecos productive: it converts brush and thin browse into a fibre that is lustrous, takes dye brilliantly, and is worth many times the weight of wool.
Elsewhere in Texas
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
