Seymour, Texas
Texas
The hottest temperature ever recorded in Texas was measured here, on a summer afternoon in 1936.
On the twelfth of August, nineteen thirty-six, a thermometer in Seymour read one hundred and twenty degrees. No place in Texas has ever recorded a hotter day, before or since. The town sits at the junction of five highways, four federal and one state, which is why it calls itself the crossroads of North Texas. It was not always called Seymour. Settlers from Oregon founded it and named it Oregon City, on the spot where the Western Trail crossed the Brazos. The name changed in eighteen seventy-nine, when a post office arrived and the town took the name of a local cowboy, Seymour Munday. The nearby town of Munday got the other half of his name. In eighteen eighty, the census counted seventy-eight people spread across a county of more than nine hundred square miles.
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.
On August 12, 1936, the temperature at Seymour reached 120 °F (49 °C), the highest temperature ever recorded in Texas.
Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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