Alvord, Texas

Texas

Alvord had more people in 1925 than it did in 2010, and the collapse came down to watermelons.

historicalpeople

Watermelons built this place up, and then they let it down. In nineteen twenty-five Alvord counted a little under fourteen hundred residents. It had a high school and an elementary school. Four churches. A weekly newspaper. Trains stopped here. Then the Great Depression arrived, and the watermelon farms and the cattle ranches went into decline together. By nineteen forty the population had fallen to eight hundred and twenty-one, with thirty-five businesses left. Twenty years later it was down again, to seven hundred and twenty people and nineteen businesses. Recovery took the rest of the century. In two thousand the town was back above a thousand, and by twenty twenty it stood at one thousand three hundred and fifty-one. That is still fewer people than lived here in nineteen twenty-five. The high-water mark of Alvord was set by a fruit crop, and it has not been beaten since.

This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
The population dropped during the Great Depression because of a decline in watermelon farms and cattle ranches.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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