Powell

Navarro County, Texas

Powell sits seven miles east of Corsicana near Lake Corsicana, on the old St. Louis Southwestern Railway line, Farm Road 653 and State Highway 31. It was named for Bud Powell, the landowner whose land became the railway's station site; the line came through in 1881 and its post office opened in 1892. The Powell oil field, discovered here in 1900, is the same boom already noted on this list at Angus and Tuckertown, and Powell is the town it was named for. By 1914 it held two general stores, two grocery stores, two cotton gins, a lumber company, a hardware store, a drugstore, a doctor and its own bank. Population peaked near five hundred in the 1920s and has settled since at around a hundred, ninety-nine to a hundred one people as of the most recent count, still standing rather than emptied out.

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Source: Texas State Historical Association, Handbook of Texas, entry for Powell, Navarro County..