Santa Fe Depot

The Handbook's tally shows what the depot was for. The railroad bought 360 acres in 1881 and platted a seventy-block town, and when the first train came through in May 1882 about forty people lived there. By 1884 Killeen had five general stores, two gristmills, two cotton gins, two saloons, a lumberyard, a blacksmith shop and a hotel, shipping cotton, wool and grain. By 1896 it added a jeweler and telephone service. Around 1904 local boosters persuaded the legislature to build bridges over Cowhouse Creek and other streams, which effectively doubled the town's trade area.

What the plaque says

Santa Fe Depot Founded in 1882 as a shipping point on the Gulf, Colorado, and Santa Fe Railroad, Killeen was named for railroad official Frank P. Killeen. After the first depot was destroyed by fire, Santa Fe workers used standard plans to build this structure in 1913. The presence of the rail line was instrumental in the U.S. Army's decision to build Camp Hood (later Fort Hood) during World War II. After the railroad took the depot out of active service, the city acquired it in 1982 and moved it to this site 350 feet west and 130 feet north of its original location. (1990)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mother Neff State Park — 21 mi
  A Leon River park that grew from six acres Isabella Neff left the state in her 1921 will, where Civilian Conservation Corps Company 817 built a stone tower, a pavilion and roads in the 1930s.
• Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum — 23 mi
  The Santa Fe depot of 1911 in a railroad town that began in 1880 as a construction camp, now a museum with locomotives and cars parked beside the active rail yard.
• Hancock Springs Park — 27 mi
  Lampasas's city park on Sulphur Creek, with a spring-fed swimming pool that holds about 69 degrees all year, the walls of the old bathhouse and a golf course.

More markers nearby

• Oveta Culp Hobby and the Women's Army Corps — 0.3 mi
• City of Killeen — 0.8 mi
• The Hiram B. Reynolds Property — 1.1 mi
• John Blackburn Log House — 1.2 mi