Historic Temple

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Above: The Missouri-Texas-Kansas
Railway was completed through
Temple in 1882, making Temple an
important junction of two major rail
lines in the state’s center.
COURTESY OF THE CANNON/BENOIT COLLECTION.
Below: The 1905 trolley tracks run
along Avenue A, looking west.
COURTESY OF THE TEMPLE PUBLIC LIBRARY.
Opposite: Temple’s original street
layout was set in logically ordered
blocks in right angles to each other.
This map shows the city’s street
numbers before 1895, when streets
were renamed and renumbered.
COURTESY OF THE TEMPLE PUBLIC LIBRARY.
renamed and renumbered. Thus, the streets east
of Main were even-numbered; to the west, oddnumbers.
North of Central, the avenues were
renamed to honor local leaders and listed in
alphabetical order—Adams, Barton, Calhoun,
Downs and French; to the south, the streets
were letters, Avenue A, Avenue B, and so on.
This configuration allowed developers to extend
its numbering and naming system as it pushed
out its city limits.
Because of its central location in the state and
the intersection of two major rail lines, Temple
attracted more people and commerce. Temple
was the hub of “the immense rich territory that
stretched unbroken by towns for a distance of
many miles in the north and south and to the
Brazos River on the east, a body of land that is
unsurpassed in the world for fertility and a
section that has rapidly settled up with the very
best classes of farmers,” according to the Dallas
Morning News.
A new city described as “hurly-burly, wideopen”
was born. It quickly became the preferred
business center in the county, and certainly the
most populous. By 1883, the Temple officials
attempted to move the county seat from Belton,
12 ✦ HISTORIC TEMPLE