Rice, TX

Rice is a Navarro County city of 1,203 residents in the 2020 census, on Interstate 45 and U.S. 287 about ten miles north of Corsicana. The railroad reached the area in 1872, and a post office followed that year. William Marsh Rice, one of the railroad owners, donated land for a church and cemetery; the town later carried his name. The first school opened around 1875, and Rice grew into a cotton, grain, and rail service point with stores, a hotel, gristmill, gin, and blacksmith shops.

Rice incorporated in 1912, the same year the Texas Electric Railway completed the Dallas-Corsicana line through town. The line helped connect local farms and businesses, although the town's population rose and fell with cotton markets, the Depression, and the pull of Corsicana and Dallas. Rice Independent School District now serves the community, and the streets still gather around the highway, railroad corridor, churches, cemetery, and school grounds. The connection to William Marsh Rice is an unusual local thread: the man remembered by a major Houston university also left land and a name to a small Navarro County city.