Smithville: Katy Railroad Town

There would be no Smithville without the Katy. When the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad laid its line through the Colorado bottomlands in the 1880s and made this a division point, it built machine shops, a roundhouse, and a depot — and a town rose around the payroll. The MKT's shopmen and their families filled the streets with churches and trim frame cottages, and because the town's fortunes rose and steadied with the railroad rather than exploding and collapsing, that early fabric survived intact. This walk threads from the depot-side railroad park up through the neighborhoods the shops built: the townsite marker, an early congregation, and a row of preserved homes that still line the old grid. It is a little under a mile on foot through a town the railroad drew from scratch.