Katy's Rice Dryers

Katy is named after a railroad, though not in the way towns usually are. The Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad was known everywhere along its line by its initials, the K-T, which crews and passengers alike said aloud as Katy. When James Oliver Thomas platted a town here in 1895 and applied for a post office the following January, the name that stuck was the railroad's nickname rather than a founder's surname or a place left behind in the old country. The tracks still run through the original town centre a few blocks north of the freeway, which is why the street grid there is at an angle to everything built since. The MKT itself is gone as a company, folded into the Union Pacific system in 1988, but the nickname it left behind is now attached to a city of more than twenty thousand people. What the railroad carried, for most of the twentieth century, was rice. William Eule brought rice farming to these dry land farmers in 1901 and it displaced cotton, peanuts and corn within a generation. The reason is underfoot: the Katy Prairie sits on a shallow clay pan that holds irrigation water where most crops would simply drain away. In 1944 the first concrete rice dryers in Texas were built here, and several of those tall pale silos still stand and are visible from the freeway. One of them now houses a museum about the industry that filled it. The prairie is the other half of the story. What survives of it, hemmed in behind the subdivisions, is a wintering ground for enormous flocks of geese, ducks and cranes that come down the central flyway every autumn.