The Flood That Made Elgin

Elgin exists because the Colorado River flooded in 1869. The Houston and Texas Central had intended to run southwest from McDade, strike the river somewhere between Bastrop and Webberville, and follow the water into Austin. The flood made that route look foolish, the surveyors moved the line north onto higher ground, and a flag stop called Glasscock opened on the new alignment in 1871, named for George W. Glasscock. It was platted and renamed on the eighteenth of August 1872 for Robert Elgin, the railroad's land commissioner and surveyor. A river nobody built on decided where a town would stand, several miles from the river. The first residents were drawn from Perryville, two and a half miles south, a place that answered to three names at once: its post office was Young's Settlement, its churches and Masonic lodge said Perryville, and everyone called it Hogeye. The nickname is the sort of thing a town keeps. It is said to come from dances held at the Litton home, where the story goes that the fiddler knew one tune, called Hogeye, and played it until the evening ended. That is told locally as legend and not as record, which is the honest way to carry it. Elgin had four hundred people by 1879 and eleven hundred by 1890, and over ten thousand by 2021. One thing has not moved: the name takes a hard G, said EL-ghin, nothing to do with gin and nothing to do with the watch company in Illinois.