The Rising Sun Brings Little Change to this City with a Stolen Name

The average Texas county is about the size of the state of Rhode Island, and Texas has 254 of them.

In most counties, there are anywhere from a few to a couple of dozen municipalities. While some of these towns have typical American city names, such as Franklin, Vernon or Columbus, there are quite a few that are far more interesting. In almost any given Texas county, you can find a town or city whose name stands out...even in a state that has a significant share of towns with interesting, descriptive, or downright weird names.

The names I tend to notice and like the most seem to fall into specific categories. They're named after physical features in or near the town, they're in Spanish (and thus a reference to a settlement's age going back to the days of Spanish and Mexican settlement of the Southwest), or they have some kind of connection to a mythical character or story (and names like this, thus, have a story behind them).

Towns named after physical features have a connection through that name to their landscape. Two that I always think of are not even named after features that are all that impressive. Flower Mound, now a booming suburb of Dallas, is named after a small mound covered with flowers just to the east of the original settlement. Round Rock, now a similarly booming suburb of Austin that is transforming into a city in its own right, is named for a, well, round boulder that is found on the shore of Brushy Creek in the original part of town.

There are others, of course. One of my favorites is a small settlement that I've never actually been to called "Notrees" west of Midland. In an almost theological fashion, it's named not for something, but for the absence of it. According to legend, when a settler was picking a name for the place, the lack of trees in the surrounding landscape was so prominent that he found it to be the best description of the place. Apparently the town actually had one native tree before 100% of the community's trees were removed in the construction of a large gas plant.

I like names that are in Spanish because they sound cool, and they can be both a reference to history or to physical landscapes as well. There are plenty of them, especially in the south half of Texas. Spanish settlers only pushed so far before the landscape's difficulties became too much of a barrier for extensive settlement. The footprint they've left can be seen in the gradual transition of river and creek names in Texas from English to Spanish as you drive south in I-35, with the Brazos river (named for it's many arms in West Texas that collect to form the giant river) being the northernmost prominent one. From Waco south, every major stream crossed by I-35 has a spanish name (including the Leon River in Temple, which means "Lion" in Spanish). Many were named for patron saints by Roman Catholic Spanish and Latin-American settlers. Interestingly, the Colorado River and the Red River are both named the "Red River", just in different languages.

I mention the rivers, because almost each one has a town that gets its name from the river, San Antonio included. Some of these towns, such as San Marcos, are located near or around the springs that form the headwaters of their namesake stream. San Marcos is an interesting example of both a name that is derived from a landscape feature as well as a historical reference to when Franciscan settlers apparently found the springs on Saint Mark's day in 1755. Others examples include Blanco, west of San Marcos, which is named for the Blanco river which gets its name from the white limestone rocks that form the bed of the clear stream, and Seguin to the east, which is a historical nod to Texas revolutionary hero Juan N. Seguin. Others such as El Paso (located in a mountain pass), Presidio (named for the historic Spanish fort nearby) and Del Rio (which is next to the Rio Grande) are more self-explanatory. There are also a substantial number of settlements with German names given by German settlers, especially in Central and South-Central Texas. Conversely, in North Texas, there are a significant number of towns, such as Waxahachie, whose current names have Native American origins.

Finally, there are plenty of names of towns in Texas that sound strange, or just are strange, and do not have a straightforward surface explanation. There are a couple I can think of that are simply literary references. Tarzan, Texas is a tiny speck of a place (population 80) on a flat highway west of Big Spring in West Texas. I remember it having a few buildings and a shop that repairs and services oil pump jacks. According to the Handbook of Texas: a settler by the name of Tant Lindsay "submitted a list of possible town names to the post office department. Postal officials chose Tarzan and made Lindsay the first postmaster."

Probably much more famous is Marfa located on a wide plateau in the mountainous Big Bend Region, a town that is well-known for its size due mainly to the presence of a continual community of artists from all over the world that have relocated (or spent time) there since Donald Judd moved there in 1971. The odd name is either derived from a character in the Jules Verne novel Michael Strogoff according to an article from the time in the Galveston Daily News, or Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, which apparently the railroad director's wife was reading at the time the town was founded. Having her be the town's name-giver isn't so far fetched because apparently railroad builders in some cases liked to name towns after their wives.

There are plenty of other examples of oddly named cities in Texas such as perhaps the most Texan name of all: Gun Barrel City, as well as Muleshoe, Zorn (a little town between San Marcos and Seguin named for a settler whose name roughly translates to "Anger" in German), Oatmeal (in Burnet County) and Wink (near the New Mexico state line). Some cities were originally given names that are far different than they have today. Austin, for example, was originally called "Waterloo", which is why you see so many references to the name in the city today such as Waterloo Park and Waterloo Records.

Now if I could only figure out where the name Austin comes from.