Houston and Texas Central Railroad

This road took over the Galveston & Red River road in 1856 and subsequently pushed a line from Houston into Brazos County, creating an important terminus at Millican in 1860. During the war, Millican became a military camp and supply depot, which benefited local merchants and area farmers who could now find a ready market. By 1864, when the town incorporated, it had 3,000 residents, “reputedly second in size only to Galveston and Houston.”¹ But the railroad’s continued expansion into the county ultimately pushed past Millican to “Bryant’s Station,” with the company beginning to “lay ties among the eighteen miles graded prior to the war” as early as August 1865.²

The 1864 Texas Almanac lists the railroad’s president, William J. Hutchins, and directors, who include William Marsh Rice. According to muir1964, “Rice became stockholder, director, bondholder, trustee, and, for a short time during a critical period in the company’s operations, general manager.” Both Rice and C. S. Longcope also had locomotives named after them.

In 1870, the railroad apparently leased some convicts from the penitentiary for work near Brenham.³ There was also a camp for the Central R.R. using convict labor to lay tracks from Corsicana to Red River City, according to testimony by S. W. Wood, an ex-guard at the camp.⁴ According to testimony from A. J. Ward, there were about 300 of 550 convicts already laboring on “the Western branch of the Central R. R. and on the Great Northern” when he and Dewey assumed control of the penitentiary on July 5, 1871.⁵

See also this history from 1903, which suggests the road ultimately absorbed the short-lived Airline Railroad on which leased convict laborers worked immediately after the Civil War.

According to beckert2014, p. 353, the line’s connection of blackland prairies to Houston and Dallas was crucial to the exponential growth in cotton production in Texas in the late nineteenth century.