Kerens TX

The railroad came through Navarro County in 1881 and the businesses at Wadeville picked up and moved to the new siding. Two Corsicana attorneys bought the town plat and sold lots through 1882. A post office opened that year and the town incorporated in 1888, though the city's own history says 1881 and the state's says 1888. It was named for a railroad man and judge from St. Louis who, by the account on the marker, never once visited the place.

Cotton, again. First gin in 1883, first bank in 1900, and by 1933 the gins here were turning out twenty-three thousand bales a year. The state highway was laid down Second Street in 1931. In 1906 there were two schools, one for two hundred and forty-two white children and one for a hundred and twenty-one black children, which is the kind of number a record keeps whether or not anybody wants it kept.

In 1949 the people of Kerens built a Santa Claus forty-nine feet tall and stood him up downtown to bring shoppers in. It worked well enough that two years later they sold him to the State Fair of Texas, which took off the Santa suit, put him in boots and a hat, and called him Big Tex. He has been standing over the fair in Dallas ever since. He came home once, for the town's centennial in 1981.

The town has held between about fourteen hundred and seventeen hundred people for a century now. It is one of the few on this list that never really shrank.