Frost TX

The railroad came through in 1881, running from Corsicana up to Hillsboro, and the town that grew at the siding took the name of the company's attorney. Businesses walked up from a place called Crossroads to be near the track. A post office opened in 1887 and Henry Jones started a school the year after that.

Cotton did the rest. By the early 1900s there were six gins here, an oil mill, seven grocery stores, two banks and three drugstores, in a town that never held more than a thousand people. Wylie Jones built the waterworks in 1890 and, having the means and apparently the inclination, a small steamboat — one of the few on an inland lake in Texas at the time.

It came on a Tuesday afternoon, the sixth of May, 1930. Two or three minutes, and the business district was gone — stores, walls, roofs, the churches, not a building left standing downtown. Twenty-two people in Frost did not see the next morning and more than sixty were hurt. Along the whole thirty-five miles of its track, through Hill, Navarro and Ellis counties, the storm killed forty-one. It is still the greatest loss of life Navarro County has recorded.

As the sky went black some of them ran for the one thing in town built to hold — the steel vault inside the Citizens State Bank, on the corner of Garrity and Front. The building came down around them. The Corsicana paper set it down two days later in a single plain line between the lists of the dead and the injured: twelve men were in the vault of the Citizens State Bank. They climbed out into a town that no longer existed. The vault held, and so did the mosaic floor already set in the ground when the walls fell on it. Both are still there.

The town had 913 people in 1929 and 748 by the census the year after. It has not been that size since — 620 at the last count. But the two- and three-storey brick blocks along the main street are what went up afterwards, on the same ground, and they are still standing.

Four years later a singer named Alger “Texas” Alexander recorded “Frost Texas Tornado Blues,” with the Mississippi Sheiks behind him. He played nothing himself; it was all in the voice. His younger cousin Sam Hopkins travelled with him through the juke joints in those years and the world came to know that one as Lightnin' Hopkins. A town of nine hundred people does not usually end up on a record.