City of Luling

No one is sure where the name came from: one account says a Chinese worker, another a Judge Luling, a third the maiden name of the railroad builder's wife. Within ten years of its founding the town had five churches, several mills, a bank, a school, a weekly newspaper and 1,800 people, shipping cotton, cottonseed oil, livestock and pecans. The San Antonio and Aransas Pass arrived in 1889. After the oil strike, Luling had 5,970 people and 175 businesses by the early 1930s, and later its farmers' watermelons gave rise to the Watermelon Thump.

What the plaque says

City of Luling Founded when Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio Railroad line intersected a main wagon road from South Texas to Austin. Many families of the Atlanta community (3 mi. SE) relocated here. Plum Creek Post Office, opened nearby in 1848, also moved here and was renamed Luling. The city was chartered Sept. 19, 1874. Original mayor was W. H. McClelland. The first aldermen were Jesse R. Bond, L. C. Cunningham, J. N. Stagner, Mike Tierney, and L. C. Wilder. Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio locator James Converse platted the townsite on Oct. 15, 1874. The G.H. & S.A. gave land for four public parks, and its president, T. W. Peirce, willed $2,000.00 to the town. Terminus of the railroad until mid-1875, Luling had heavy shipping and trade in its infancy. In late 1874 the population was 800 to 1,000, including drifters who gave the place an early reputation as a tough town. The law-abiding, however, established churches, schools, and stability, and within a few years the railroad boom town was only a legend. An oil boom began in 1922, and 125 producing wells have now been drilled within the city limits. Three major oil fields surround the town, which in later years has become also an agribusiness center. (1974)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lockhart Courthouse Square — 14 mi
  A cotton-era courthouse town named the Barbecue Capital of Texas, built near the 1840 Plum Creek fight that followed the killing of Comanche leaders at peace talks.
• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 22 mi
  The headsprings of the San Marcos River, among the longest-inhabited places in North America, once an amusement park with a swimming pig and now seen from glass-bottom boats.
• Gruene Historic District — 28 mi
  A cotton town on the Guadalupe that the boll weevil emptied, rescued in the 1970s by a kayaking architecture student, with a dance hall that says it has never closed.

More markers nearby

• Edgar B. Davis, Oil Pioneer-Philanthropist — 0.2 mi
• Episcopal Church of the Annunciation — 0.2 mi
• Rosenwald School — 0.5 mi
• Zedler's Mills — 1.0 mi