Before there was a town here, the prairie ran open from Chatfield to Waxahachie. A mail carrier on that route remembered no fences and no trees, only bunch grass and thousands of buffalo wallows that held water after a rain.¹ By 1860 a few families were farming it: the Edmundsons, the Sessions, the Bartletts, the Langhams.² William Langham's log house was still standing a hundred years later.³

The town of consequence was east of here, at Porter's Bluff on the Trinity, a ferry crossing and river landing. In 1866 a flood took more than half of it, and that half was never rebuilt.⁴ Its people began moving west onto the prairie. When the Houston and Texas Central Railroad came north in 1871 and 1872, it passed the bluff by and ran through here instead, and that settled it.⁵

One of the railroad's principal investors was William Marsh Rice, a Houston merchant. The state's marker in town says he gave five hundred acres for a station and a townsite, and the town took his name.⁶ The marker at the Methodist church says he gave that site too, and the county history says he gave ground for a church and the cemetery.⁷ A man who gave five hundred acres could have given all three.

Rice was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1816 and came to Houston in 1839. He made a fortune in merchandise, cotton, land and railroads, and in 1891 he chartered an institute for the city that had made him rich.⁸ He was living in New York when, on the night of September 23, 1900, his valet, Charles F. Jones, killed him with chloroform as he slept.⁹ Jones was acting for a lawyer, Albert T. Patrick, who had forged a will leaving himself the estate. The forgery was found out. Patrick was sentenced to death and later pardoned, and the money went where Rice meant it to go.¹⁰

The William Marsh Rice Institute began classes in Houston on September 23, 1912, twelve years to the day after his death.¹¹ Ten weeks later, on December 2, the town that carried his name voted to incorporate.¹²

The first business in Rice was a two-story frame building, with L. B. Haynie's general store downstairs and Ed Taber's hotel upstairs.¹³ The post office opened on October 2, 1872.¹⁴ The Rev. Jerry Ward opened the first school on the first Monday of October 1875, in a frame house that served as church as well.¹⁵ The Methodists organized in 1874 and the Baptists in 1875.¹⁶ In 1876 the town made it official that there would never be a saloon in Rice, and there never was.¹⁷

In 1877 or 1878 a trainload of settlers came down from New York and New Jersey looking for a warmer place to live. The next morning the ground was white with snow, and some of them got back on the train.¹⁸ The rest took up land north of the cemetery toward Walker's Creek. One of them, Stephen H. Sayer, the colony's secretary, wrote to the Rice paper from New York in 1912.¹⁹ He remembered shooting prairie chickens from his porch, a fight with an alligator of more than a hundred pounds pulled out of the Trinity, and a bee tree whose horsemint honey was as hot as cayenne pepper.²⁰ He had left his farm for Hubbard City, where he ran the newspaper.

Cotton made the town. Bales stood stacked high on the loading platforms, and the station was a major cotton shipping point.²¹ A train of Spanish-American War recruits came through in 1898.²² A fire in May 1901 burned nearly a third of the business district.²³ The First State Bank of Rice was organized in 1902, and in 1908 the Methodists built their brick church and named it for their steward, W. D. Haynie.²⁴

In 1912 the Texas Electric Railway finished its interurban line from Dallas to Corsicana through Rice.²⁵ Mrs. Lewis Haynie remembered the roadbed being laid by Irishmen with wheelbarrows.²⁶ For the next thirty years you could board an electric car in Rice and ride it into Dallas. The election that December made the town a city, and the 1986 county history names J. W. South as its first mayor.²⁷ A family memoir names G. W. Harper as mayor in the county's record of that year, and the county minutes would settle it.²⁸

In November 1915 the Liberty Bell came home from the world's fair in San Francisco by way of Texas. Its train ran from Dallas to Corsicana on the old Houston and Texas Central line, through Rice.²⁹ It came late in the night, because people all along the way stood on the tracks to make it slow down. Those who were there remembered the crack, plain to see on the flatcar.³⁰

The next summer, in August 1916, a mob hanged Edward Lang from a telephone pole near the railroad tracks. He was nineteen and Black, and accused of an attempted assault.³¹ Papers in Waxahachie and as far away as Tampa reported it, and the NAACP put his name on its list of the lynched.³² The town's own history, written in 1967, recorded it in a single sentence and called it a shameful thing.³³ It was.

In 1906 Rice's two public schools held 127 white children and 125 Black children, very nearly half and half.³⁴ The 1921 fire-insurance map shows a Colored Baptist church and a Colored Methodist church at the edge of town.³⁵

That 1921 map counted 613 people. It shows two railroads running side by side through the middle of town, the steam line and the interurban, with a depot for each.³⁶ There were three gins, Fortson Brothers', H. C. Noel's and the Farmers' Union, plus a cotton yard and warehouse.³⁷ The map's note on fire protection is short: no public water works, private wells and cisterns only, and no fire department.³⁸

Rice peaked at about 900 people in 1929.³⁹ Then came the Depression, and the young people left for the cities.⁴⁰ The interurban to Corsicana stopped running in 1941.⁴¹ By 1945 there were 489 people and eight businesses, and by the middle 1960s about 250.⁴² The town history of 1967 noted that many people in Rice had never ridden a train, because they had always had cars.⁴³

Then Interstate 45 was built alongside the old railroad, and Dallas came within a short drive. Rice grew back past its old peak and kept going, over the county line into Ellis County.⁴⁴ At the 2020 census it had 1,203 people, more than at any time in its history,⁴⁵ and it is the only one of our six towns that is bigger now than it ever was.

William Marsh Rice's name is on a university in Houston. It is also on a town he gave the ground for, on the prairie the buffalo wallowed. If you have pictures of old Rice, the depot, the gins or the interurban, or family papers from the colony years, they belong here.