Omaha

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm just gonna do my best to honor every word. Somewhere up on the Seidicum Line, the old boundary between Bowie and Red River counties, surveyed way back in 1840, there sits a little town with a name that didn't come easy. Thompson Morris laid out the town in 1880, and he had a perfectly good name for it: Morristown.

Straightforward, sensible, the kind of name a man gives a place when he figures he's earned it. But the post office had other ideas. The post office called it Gravett.

Now you've got two names, two camps, and nobody backing down. So what do you do when a town can't agree on what to call itself? You do what any reasonable Texan would do in a pinch.

You put some names in a hat and you draw one out. And the name that came out of that hat was Omaha. Why Omaha?

Well, the marker tells us it was the old home of a settler who'd come down from Alabama. That's the full story there, and it's enough. A settler remembered a place, that name ended up in a hat, and a hat decided the whole matter.

There's something almost poetic about a town named by chance, sitting right on a line that was itself drawn by surveyors a full forty years before the town even existed. Today Omaha serves as a shipping center for plants and farm products. The boundary's still there, the name stuck, and the hat, wherever it ended up, did its job.

What the marker says

On Seidicum Line, the old Bowie-Red River counties boundary surveyed in 1840. Thompson Morris laid out "Morristown" in 1880, but post office was "Gravett." To arbitrate, a drawing from a hat suggested "Omaha," for old home of a settler from Alabama. Town is now a shipping center for plants and farm products. (1966)