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The
big yellow and red blob moving west through Llano County toward Austin
looked like a living thing on the radar, with a couple of rotating
rings indicating possible tornadoes.
The huge thunderstorm, a TV meteorologist warned, soon would be dumping
rain and large hail directly over Gainesville.
Gainesville?
That town’s in Cooke County, practically on the bank of the Red River.
Why would an Austin television station be alerting its viewers to
bad weather approaching a city 250 miles from its viewing area?
Later, a little research revealed that the sophisticated computer
software the TV station uses to superimpose the radar image over a
map showing area communities and roadways had not made a mistake.
Llano County does indeed have a place called Gainesville.
Of course, judging from the satellite imagery, the Gainesville in
Central Texas is the ghostliest of ghost towns. Nothing appears to
be there anymore, just a name on the map designating a point on Ranch
Road 3404 between U.S. 71 and Kingsland. (For the global positioning
set, it’s Latitude 30.678, longitude 98.521, elevation 974 feet above
sea level.)
Also known as Paschall, Llano County’s Gainesville has no zip code
to call its own. Or anything else for that matter. Just a dot that
still survives on the U.S. Geological Survey map.
Turns out, Texas has not only two, but three Gainesvilles. The third
is in Harrison County in East Texas. (Latitude 36.617, longitude 94.319,
elevation 367 feet.)
This East Texas community has a cemetery and once had a church, though
a satellite image doesn’t reveal much of anything else but a computer-generated
pinpoint on FM 1793, east of U.S. 59 and before you get to Bonita
Lake.
Like Llano County’s Gainesville, the Gainesville near Marshall does
not have a zip code under its name. If either community ever had a
post office (which seems unlikely given their copycat names) they
don’t now.
While Gainesville
seems to be the only Texas city with the distinction of having two
satellite burgs, it’s not the only community in the state with a little-known
double.
The
largest Texas city with a nomenclature skeleton rattling around in
its closest is Victoria,
the 61,000 population county seat of Victoria County.
The other Victoria (31.355 longitude, 96.463 latitude) is in southwestern
Limestone County, slightly west of FM 339 and the small-dot community
of Kirk. If you get to Ben
Hur, you’ve gone too far. If you end up in Mart
or Thelma, you’re hopelessly lost.
Going down the list of Texas cities and
towns, no other identical twins show up, but no shortage of kind-of-close
names exist to pose confusion to travelers or researchers.
With apologies to Johnny Cash, there’s Bay
City, Baytown,
Bayview; Bridge Center and Bridgeport;
Brownsboro, Brownfield,
Brownwood, and
Brownsville;
Cedar Park and Cedar
Hill; Center
City and Centerville;
Eden
and Edom; Falcon and Falcon Heights; Friendship
and Friendswood;
Grapevine
and Grapeland;
Orange and Orangefield;
Palmhurst, Palm View, and Palm Valley; Progresso
and Progresso Lakes; Ranger
and Rangerville; Richland,
Richmond and
Spring and Springtown. And probably a few others.
Despite
all the similar town names that somehow made it through the post office
vetting process, some nominal (yes, pun intended) successes can be
found.
One example is a community in Liveoak County first called Hamiltonburg.
The Hamiltonburg post office got mail intended for Hamilton, in Hamilton
County, and vice versa. In 1914, the Post Office Department complained
about the similar town names. Hamilton being long-established, the
onus fell on Hamiltonburg to come up with a different name.
Citizens circulated a petition proposing that the year-old town be
named Tips in honor of developer Charles Tips, but Tips modestly declined.
Instead, he proposed a name based on the local geography. Since the
Atascosa, Frio and Nueces Rivers converged nearby, he suggested, why
not call our town Three
Rivers? That handle suited the townsfolk and made it unscathed
through the federal bureaucracy. With the stroke of some government
worker’s pen, Hamiltonburg became a place with a much more evocative
name. An added bonus: The name gave the impression that the place
had plenty of water, helpful for business development.
Maybe the good folks in some of the kissing cousin towns of Texas
need to get a petition drive going and come up with something catchier
than their same-sounding names. |
© Mike Cox
"Texas Tales"
June 26, 2008 column
More on Texas Towns | Texas
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Announcement
Mike Cox's "The Texas Rangers: Wearing the Cinco Peso, 1821-1900,"
the first of a two-volume, 250,000-word definitive history of the
Rangers, was released by Forge Books in New York on March 18, 2008
Kirkus Review, the American Library Association's Book List and the
San Antonio Express-News have all written rave reviews about this
book, the first mainstream, popular history of the Rangers since 1935. |
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