EP. 95: Texas Towns: Welcome to Provident City!

Wise About Texas

Ken Wise

Texan, Places & Travel, Education, Texas, Cowboy, History, Society & Culture, Culture, Jacinto, Texans, San

5 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 4 January 2021

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the early 20th century, Texas had room to grow. Like the empresarios of the early 1800's, real estate drove efforts to settle new Texans. But not all developers were honest. Promises of historically productive land, railroads and pleasant temperatures lured many to the coastal prairie. Towns were built...and towns died. One in particular was billed as a farming paradise. Two crops a year plus a railroad on its way. Hundreds came to Texas to establish this paradise, appropriately named Provident City. Hear an all-too-typical tale of early 20th century land deals in the latest episode of Wise About Texas.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Howdy and welcome to Wise About Texas, the Texas History Podcast, I'm your host Ken Wise. Thank you all so much for
0:15.4	tuning in today for a little bit of Texas history. Happy New Year this
0:19.7	podcast episode is being recorded and released in January 2021, so I hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas
0:28.0	and I hope that 2021 is a happy and prosperous year for you.
0:33.0	Well, today we're going to talk about a town.
0:36.0	Now, I've mentioned before that Texas has always been about land
0:41.0	and one of the ways that land speculators would try and make money is to buy a piece of
0:47.2	land near where they thought a railroad might be built. Now this might sound familiar.
0:52.2	It's the same way we do it today in the real estate
0:54.8	business. This time the railroad's a little bit less important and we're into
0:59.2	roads and building roads and proximity to freeways and curb cuts and entrances and all that stuff that you got to deal with when you're developing real estate
1:09.0	but in the old days it was a railroad and the railroad might mean a difference between a town's survival and a town's demise.
1:16.5	So today is a story about just such a situation, although this town was built for farming or so its promoters claimed.
1:26.0	And this story is a good example of the type of development that was attempted in the early 20th century.
1:32.0	Promoters from out of state would buy land in Texas because it was
1:37.0	relatively inexpensive and then try to sell it off and one of the ways they would do that was to settle people from outside Texas, get
1:46.8	them to move down here and start a new life.
1:50.3	Now I suppose that's continuing. In times. I heard just yesterday that Texas, Arizona, and Florida were the three states where people moving within the United States are moving to in the greatest quantities.
2:06.0	And of course that's been true for Texas for several years.
2:09.0	But we're going to look at how that operated in the early 1900s.
2:15.0	So we're going to go back to 1909 to get wise about Texas. Texas in the early 20th century was really in the process of populating. And what I mean by that is the Indian Wars had ended in the
2:35.2	1870s. The far west Texas area and the panhandle areas had been largely
	...

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