Merkel, TX

Merkel is a Taylor County town seventeen miles west of Abilene, with Interstate 20 and the old Texas and Pacific route crossing the West Texas plain. The 2020 census counted 2,471 residents. It began as Windmill Town when the railroad arrived in the early 1880s, then took the Merkel name in honor of S. Merkel, an early settler. The rail line made the place a shipping point before Merkel ever had a city hall.

Merkel's early school story is wonderfully improvised: the first classes met in a boxcar that also served as a post office, church, telegraph station, and railway station. That strange first school tells you a lot about frontier rail towns. The town incorporated in 1906, and Merkel ISD still keeps the school connection local. Churches, farms, ranches, and small businesses grew around the rail stop, while the windmill nickname stuck. Merkel is a West Texas road town with a railroad skeleton underneath it and Abilene close enough to shape the larger daily orbit.