Crawford, TX

Crawford sits west of Waco where the old Middle Bosque River crossing became a town. Settlement centered on Tonk Crossing in the 1850s; a post office followed in 1871, and the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway laid tracks two miles west in 1881. That shifted the town’s center toward the rail line and helped build Crawford’s early mills, stores, churches, and cotton trade. George W. Bush’s Prairie Chapel Ranch later made the town widely known, but the older story is still there in the crossing, the railroad, and the small McLennan County grid. Crawford is a Texas town with two very different kinds of history sharing one map.