The History of Richards, Texas

Editor’s note. This is the thirteenth installment of “Texas Towns: The Stories Behind the Map.” Dobbin was the Montgomery County crossing of the Trinity and Brazos Valley. A few miles north, on the same railroad, the people of two older Grimes County communities picked up and moved. Some of them took the buildings with them.

Richards, Texas, is an unincorporated community in east central Grimes County, on Farm roads 1486 and 149. The mailing ZIP is 77873. Lake Creek is the local water. The railroad is why the town is a grid instead of a scatter of farms. [1]

1907: a town assembled at a crossing

Anglo-American settlers were in this part of the county in the early 1830s. The Handbook is plain that no community stood here until the tracks did. Richards was founded in 1907, when residents of several settlements near Lake Creek moved to a new line of the Trinity and Brazos Valley Railway, at the place where the railroad crossed the road between Fairview — also called Dolph — and Longstreet. [1]

Fairview and Longstreet led the migration. Some families hired log rollers and shifted houses and stores intact onto the new townsite. That is not a metaphor. It is how a railroad town in the pine woods acquired a Main Street in a single season: the street came to the buildings, or the buildings came to the street, on logs. [1]

Railway officials named the place for W. E. Richards, a South Texas banker and an organizer of the Valley Route and Townsite Loan Company. The Longstreet post office was transferred. Jim Lieb was the first postmaster at Richards. [1]

A bank, a Rustler, and a church that arrived on wheels

Green Davis and O. A. Hamilton organized the Richards State Bank. The early town had a drugstore, a hotel, a barbershop, a shoe shop, several general stores, and a weekly newspaper called the Richards Rustler. In 1914 the Methodist church was established when the meetinghouse itself was hauled in from Fairview. The log rollers were not a one-time stunt. They were the local moving company. [1]

The census of ambition, if not of the federal government, is 450 people in 1910. In 1936 the Handbook gives 500 residents and eighteen businesses. That is the high-water mark it records. [1]

The long thinning

After World War II the estimates fall and the Handbook marks them as estimates. About 425 people in 1948. About 305 in 1969, with four businesses. In 1990, about 296 people and three businesses. The 2000 estimate was left at 296. [1]

The counts attached to the same entry later read 300 in 2009, 184 in 2020, and 136 in 2021. The 1936 figure of 500 is the Handbook’s own high count, stated as a population with eighteen businesses. The 2020 figure of 184 is a later count on the same page. They are not one smooth line, and they do not need to be averaged into one. The railroad town that had a weekly paper is a smaller place now. [1]

The town never incorporated. The post office, ZIP 77873, is the institution that stayed. [1]

Not that Richards

Search the name and a later Ann Richards arrives first. She was governor of Texas from 1991 to 1995. She has nothing to do with this town. Railway officials named Richards in 1907, for W. E. Richards, a banker who organized a townsite company. [1]

The complete story of Richards

Richards is a 1907 decision to quit two older communities and stand at a new depot.

It is log rollers, a transferred post office, a state bank, and a paper called the Rustler. It is a Methodist church that changed towns without changing buildings.

And it is a 1962 map that still knew where Longstreet was, east of the grid, on the road the houses left behind.