Sanger's Railroad Roots

Sanger exists because a steam engine needed water. In 1886 the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway laid out a watering stop at mile post 392.16 on its line running north from Fort Worth toward Indian Territory, and its nearness to north Denton County cattle ranches and the old Chisholm Trail made it worth a side track, cattle pens, and a depot. The landowner, Elizabeth Bullock Huling, promptly hired surveyors to plat a townsite around the stop and donated ground for a school, a square, a church, and a cemetery. First called Huling, then New Bolivar, the town was finally named for the Sanger Brothers dry-goods firm and incorporated in 1892. This walk clusters around that railroad-born core along Bolivar Street: the railway itself, the town's first mayor, the founding families, the historic churches, and the cemetery on land the founder gave.