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.¹

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.² 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.³

It came on a Tuesday afternoon, the sixth of May, 1930.⁴ Two or three minutes, and the business district was gone — stores, walls, roofs, the churches, hardly a building left standing downtown.⁵ Twenty-two people in Frost did not see the next morning and more than fifty were hurt.⁶ Along the whole thirty-five miles of its track, through Hill, Navarro and Ellis counties, the storm killed forty-one.⁷ It is the greatest loss of life a storm has caused in this county.

As the sky went black some of them ran f⁸or the one thing in town built to hold — the steel vault inside the Citizens State Bank, on the corner of Garitty and Front.⁹ 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.¹⁰ 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.

They were not the only ones. The Blooming Grove Times, printed five miles east that Friday, put it this way: “As many people as could crowded into the vaults of the two banks and were not injured while the buildings about them fell in.”¹¹ The other bank stood across Garitty Street on the far corner of Front, with the Masonic hall on its second floor, as the fire-insurance map of 1915 shows it.¹² That building is the city hall today, and its vault is still there too.¹³

The town had 913 people in 1929 and 748 by the census the year after.¹⁴ It has not been that size since — 620 at the last count.¹⁵ But the brick blocks along the main street, on the same ground, are still standing.

Five weeks later, in San Antonio, a singer named Alger “Texas” Alexander recorded “Frost Texas Tornado Blues,” with the Mississippi Sheiks behind him.¹⁶ He played nothing himself; it was all in the voice.¹⁷ His younger cousin Sam Hopkins travelled with him to house parties and picnics in those years and the world came to know that one as Lightnin' Hopkins.¹⁸ A town of nine hundred people does not usually end up on a record.