Texarkana, U.S.A.
The Establishment and Growth of a Two-state City in the Age of Railroad Travel
In late nineteenth-century America, as the industrial age steamed ahead and Anglo-American settlers migrated evermore westward, a new kind of city emerged: the railroad town. The meeting of the Central Pacific Railroad and the Union Pacific Railroad in 1869 famously marked the beginning of transcontinental commerce.[1] As various iron roads crisscrossed the country, towns were established in strategic locations. Like the transcontinental railroad, Texarkana, U.S.A. is a product of post-Civil War national railroad expansion. The El Paso & Pacific railroad reached the area that would later become Texarkana in 1857 but was not complete. In 1872, after the Civil War had ended, the El Paso & Pacific Railroad became a part of the Texas & Pacific Railroad, which was given a land grant by Congress in 1871 to build a railway between Marshall, Texas and San Diego, California. The line between Marshall, Longview, and Dallas was completed in 1873, and the line between Marshall and the Texas-Arkansas state line was completed later that year.[2] It was at the state line where the Texas & Pacific railroad would meet the Cairo & Fulton railroad. The area surrounding this junction would later become Texarkana. Selection for the site of Texarkana was described in the Gate City News of January 2, 1875:
"Texarkana, The Gate City of Texas!
Situated at the junction of the Cairo and Fulton and the Texas and Pacific Railway, on the northeastern boundary of Texas, at the southwest corner of Arkansas, and near the northwest corner of Louisiana, on the Great Trunk Line into Texas, direct from St. Louis, Memphis and Little Rock. This being the shortest route from the North and East into Texas, Texarkana is the natural inlet for trade and commerce, and offers inducements that are unsurpassed for business houses of all branches of trade. Located here, with facilities for shipments to all points of Texas and Louisiana, Merchants will control the trade of a very large section of country."[3]
It was a period of transition. A half-century later, Americans would zoom across U.S. highways in their automobiles, but for now, they no longer had to go west by stagecoach, which would cost around $1,000 and take five to six months. The transcontinental railroad brought the cost down to about $150 and the travel time down to six days.[4] As more track was laid down, more and more people traveled west by train, and more and more towns sprang up to serve those travelers. Hotels, eating houses, general stores, and saloons were the first businesses to appear in these fledgling railroad towns with their grid-patterned streets.
The establishment of new towns became something of a routine for railroad companies of the late nineteenth century, and at first glance, Texarkana appears to be just another clone in that story. Like other western railroad towns, the city is designed with streets jutting straight out from the railroad depot, which are perpendicularly crossed by other streets, creating a grid pattern with square blocks. The direction of the streets is determined by the railroad. In Texarkana’s case, the main line runs northeast to southwest (which, of course, is the direction one would travel from Little Rock to Dallas), and the streets that begin at the depot run southeast to northwest. However, Texarkana’s footprint has a peculiar feature: the city is cut in half by the Arkansas-Texas state line, which is a geometric boundary that runs directly north and south. Colonel Rollin W. Rodgers was one of the men present when Texarkana’s first lots were sold in 1873, and he could see the problem with a state line dividing the town. He traveled to the Texas & Pacific railroad office in Marshall, Texas, where General G.M. Dodge granted him a fifty-foot-wide strip of land running along the Texas side of the state line from the railroad up to where the post office was later built. Rodgers then traveled to Little Rock, Arkansas, where he obtained a similar grant from Colonel Joseph A. Longborough of the St. Louis, Iron Mountain & Southern Railroad on the Arkansas side of the state line. This bi-state strip of land would be the corridor of State Line Avenue, which today runs from the Bi-State Justice Building to Interstate 30 before turning into U.S. Highway 71.[5]
The legacy of pre-automobile railroad travel can be seen in today’s somewhat gentrified downtown Texarkana. Traveling north from the Bi-State Justice Building along Stateline Avenue to the local United States Post Office and Courthouse—Texarkana’s most famous tourist attraction—gives a unique view of triangular blocks and buildings, including the infamous Grim Hotel, which opened in 1925. Named after William Rhoads Grim, a banker who also served as president of the Louisiana & Arkansas Railroad and later as a director of the Kansas City Southern Railroad, this eight-story concrete building marked a departure from Texarkana’s timber construction hotels of an earlier, less prosperous, age. The Grim is one of many legacy hotels in the area around Union Station and the most prominent feature of downtown Texarkana’s skyline. Its main competitor was Hotel McCartney, a ten-story skyscraper with one-hundred twenty-five guest rooms, large banquet halls, and a grand lobby with fluted columns. William A. McCartney, owner of the McCartney Hotel, was the son of William H. McCartney, owner of the earlier Cosmopolitan Hotel, which was on the same lot—at the foot of State Line Avenue right across from Union Station. Railroad travelers would simply need to cross Front Street after exiting the station to book a room at the luxurious Hotel McCartney.[6]
Texarkana’s grand hotels would remain the pinnacle of luxury travel for only a few decades. Hotel McCartney closed in 1970 and still sits abandoned behind the Bi-State Justice Building. The Grim Hotel had a longer life, remaining open until October, 1990. After sitting abandoned and empty for thirty-three years, The Grim Hotel was remodeled and converted to section eight housing in 2023. Indeed, walking through parts of downtown Texarkana can feel like walking through the ruins of a time when people moved and interacted in a completely different way. Rail lines in North America are used primarily for freight today, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, trains and their railroad towns also had to accommodate people who demanded luxury and comfort as they traversed the country. Transportation infrastructure gradually changed, and the east and west-bound Interstate Highway 30 was built along the north side of the city, causing the economic center of gravity to shift from downtown to the Interstate corridor. Texarkana historian Beverly Rowe describes the change in her book Historic Texarkana:
"Texarkana had numerous other hotels during the busy years of railroad transportation. However, by the mid to late 1950s, private automobile travel on the nation’s expanding networks of highways and superhighways led to the decline of downtown hotel patronage. As a result, motels along the highways replaced hotels in the city’s core, and Texarkana’s grand hotels became vacant structures haunting the city’s skyline." [7]
As a native Texarkanian who grew up exploring the city’s downtown and gawking at its numerous large abandoned buildings, I can vouch that Rowe’s choice of the word “haunting” is absolutely appropriate.
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