Almeda

Almeda, on State Highway 288 and the Missouri Pacific tracks eleven miles south of Houston in southwestern Harris County, was named for Almeda King, daughter of Dr. Willis King, who promoted the townsite in the early 1880s. The town was built on the International-Great Northern Railroad and served as a trading center for an agricultural and lumbering community. It had a post office from 1893, when the population was fifty, to 1959. In 1905 the local school had thirty-one students and a single teacher. The population reached 200 by 1914, when the town supported two general stores and a lumber company. It was eighty in 1925, 125 in 1948, and 1,200 in 1962. State highway maps in 1936 showed two schools within a mile of the community and several buildings. Businesses increased from four in the 1930s to twenty in the 1950s and forty by the 1960s. As late as 1960, however, local residents remained without public water service or a fire department. Sewers were first built in 1963. In the 1980s a school, three churches, an abandoned railroad station, and scattered dwellings remained at the townsite.