DTMFall'25_Final - Flipbook - Page 13
Ariel View of San Angelo, circa 1907. Photo Courtesy of Picryl.com
On September 15, 1888, the Santa Fe Railroad
roared into San Angelo on a narrow-gauge track
from Ballinger, the culmination of years of effort
and fundraising by the city’s earliest merchants. Its
arrival was greeted by some 3,000 visitors, bands,
a parade and a grand ball. The little city, which only
a few years before was a mere settlement
populated by gamblers and prostitutes and best
avoided by soldiers stationed across the river at
Fort Concho, was now irrevocably connected to
the wider world and a bona fide beacon of
enterprise in our young nation, which dreamed
ever westward to its future. The “pathless prairie”
was no more, gone the way of the great herds of
bison and the indigenous tribes that used only
Nature for clock and calendar. For good or ill, the
white man was dug in, and his clock was set to
Commerce.
The city was incorporated on January 15, 1889, by a
vote of 245-242, a narrow margin and, according to
the Fort Worth Daily Gazette, the fourth attempt at
incorporation. J. G. Preusser served as mayor, a
post he held even before incorporation was
realized. Merchants and citizens would vote
against incorporation (and the attendant
taxations) several times until the city’s final
incorporation in 1903. In 1889, approximately
2,500 people resided in the city; that numbered
doubled in the succeeding decades so that by 1910
the population swelled to over 10,000 (as recorded
by the Texas Almanac). In the 1890’s, and again
largely due to the fundraising efforts and
investment of the downtown merchants, San
Angelo could boast electric lighting, telephone and
telegraph lines and a fire department, as well as a
water-power company, icehouse, banks, hotels,
local newspapers (the Enterprise and the Standard),
and mercantile and grocery stores. Indeed, even
Fort Worth looked on the growth of San Angelo as
an example to be emulated.
Yea
245-242
Nay
The Fort Worth Daily Gazette of July 3, 1889, called
for “a progressive committee whose duties should
consist in systematic and untiring work for the
public good . . . Denison, San Angelo, Weatherford
and Abilene each have such committees, and to
them is to be ascribed the great success and
advancement of these towns within the past year.
They are untiring in their efforts to secure
factories, fairs and other profitable investments,
and Fort Worth with such a committee . . . could
and would cause many enterprises to locate here
that will without such efforts go elsewhere or not
invest at all.”
Of course, the most pressing concerns in those
early years were the city’s infrastructure–water,
electricity, communications and transportation.
Once San Angelo was connected by rail,
transporting durable building materials became
easier and cheaper. Many of the names of those
responsible for reshaping San Angelo from its
crude beginnings into a progressive modern city
still echo today, and a brief account of the early
beginnings of city services that we largely take for
granted today–unless they aren’t working
properly–provides the background for some of our
street and place names.
DowntownSanAngelo.com | 13
