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. Strobridge, the construction superintendent who had driven the building of the transcontinental line. When the roundhouse went up in 1882 the company changed it again, to Sanderson, after Thomas P. Sanderson, the engineer in charge of construction. Two railroad men in two years, and the founder's name on neither. Wilson is remembered instead for one act of commercial defence. Roy Bean, working his way west along the construction, ran a saloon in the new town for a short time, and Wilson is said to have got into his stock and dosed the whiskey barrels with kerosene. Bean moved on. The story is why Sanderson calls itself the town too mean for Bean, though it is worth saying that the scholarly account of Bean's life does not mention the episode at all. He settled instead at a place called Eagle's Nest, which the railroad had renamed Langtry, sixty miles back east. Sanderson stayed a division point for decades, is the seat of Terrell County, and calls itself the Cactus Capital of Texas.