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Located roughly 40 miles north of Austin, on the westernmost edge of Bell County,

Colleen, Texas was founded in 1882 after the land was purchased by the railroad to extend tracks through the area

the prior year. After the tracks were built, construction on 72 city blocks began on the town

named after railroad exec Frank P. Colleen, a man who wasn't from the area, and in fact had never stepped foot there.

Immediately following the construction of the lumberyard, gristmills, and cotton gins,

were a couple saloons, followed by, of course, drunk gunslingers who'd often take their

disagreements and pistols to the city's streets for settling.

By the early 1890s, lawlessness had gotten so out of hand in Colleen

that the town was incorporated as an official Texas city just to bring in law enforcement to calm

things down. The half decade or so after that was fairly low-key in the area.

It was sparsely populated and consisted mostly of cotton farmers and gin workers.

Though the Texas legislature's approval and subsequent building of bridges over area streams

just after the turn of the 20th century

nearly doubled the population of Colleen, bringing it to 1,300, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's

New Deal brought paved roads along with public water and sewage systems after the Great Depression.

It wasn't until the construction of Camp Hood that the city's population and development really took off. When the U.S. entered World War II,

the immediate need to train soldiers to fight Germany's sophisticated war machine technology transformed Killeen, Texas, from a modest

but significant cotton producer into little more than a military boomtown. The city lost about half

of its trade center to Camp Hood. The farming and ranching economies were virtually destroyed,

as were the businesses related to them.

Though a thousand or so citizens left, they were replaced by about the same number of transplants in the form of soldiers, their families, and Camp Hood construction workers.

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