Railroad Town on the Houston & Texas Central

Ennis exists because a railroad needed a stop. In 1872 the Houston & Texas Central laid out a 647-acre townsite along its new line north toward Dallas and named the place for Colonel Cornelius Ennis, one of the railroad's officials. What turned a platted grid into a real town was a single hard-won bargain: in 1891 the H&TC agreed to move its northern division headquarters here — a roundhouse, machine shops, and offices — on the condition that Ennis could always supply water for the engines. The town dammed two lakes to keep that promise, and for decades Ennis was known as the place where the railroads met the cotton fields. This walking loop through downtown follows that bargain's payoff: the depot-turned-museum, the bank a railroad-era merchant built, the City Hall a local architect raised at the height of the boom, and the markers that tell how the line made the town.