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"Main Street Looking North, Cisco, Texas"
1920 postcard courtesy rootsweb.com/~txgenweb// postcards/Index.html |
Red
Gap was the city's original name. The Reverend C. G. Stevens arrived
in the late 1870s, established a post office and church and named
the town.
In 1881 when the Houston and Texas Central Railway came into the area.
they crossed the Texas and Pacific Railroad tracks near Red Gap and
locals moved to the crossing. In 1884 this new community applied for
a post office in the name of one of the railroad financiers, John
A. Cisco, of New York.
Cisco became known as the "Gate City of the West" from the
immigrant brochures issued by the T & P.
By 1892 Cisco was a thriving town with two newspapers, but the following
year it was hit by a devastating tornado, taking the lives of twenty-eight
people and destroying much of the town.
The Eastland County oil boom of 1919-21, was played-out more in Ranger,
but Cisco's population increased as well. Population estimates during
the boom were as high as 15,000. |
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The Cisco
Masonic Lodge
TE Photo 2004 |
In 1927 the famed "Santa
Claus Bank Robbery" occurred two days before Christmas. The First
National Bank was robbed and two girls kidnapped. One robber died
of wounds, one served time and one was executed. Marshall Ratliff,
the mastermind, was lynched by a mob in downtown Eastland after killing
a popular jailer during a failed escape attempt. A book by A.C. Greene
gives a detailed and entertaining account of the robbery and the fiasco
was made into at least one movie.
See also Santa Robber
by Mike Cox
Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” stands as an enduring classic,
but truth being stranger than fiction, Texas can claim one of the
nation’s more bizarre real-life holiday tales – a story of a Santa
Claus gone bad...
See Cisco, Texas
Cisco
Hotels >
Book Your Hotel Here & Save
© John Troesser |
Recommended
Book
The Santa Claus Bank Robbery |
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