Clyde

Clyde is an incorporated community on Interstate Highway 20 and Farm Road 604, five miles west of Baird and eight miles east of Abilene in northwestern Callahan County. The site is on the Callahan Divide between the Brazos and Colorado rivers; its elevation is 1,980 feet above sea level. The Texas and Pacific Railway was built through the area in 1880. Local sources have it that the railroad construction crew, which numbered 5,000, including many Chinese, gathered regularly at Robert Clyde's construction camp, just south of the tracks. Settlers moved in to the area, and the post office for the new community was commissioned in June 1881. In 1883 several Irish families moved to Clyde from Pennsylvania. Also around that time a group of Portuguese traveled to the area by the railroad and established a colony in the vicinity of Clyde; this colony was abandoned about 1900. A school and churches were formed at Clyde and met in local homes. A Methodist church organized at the community in 1884 and built a church building in 1904; a Baptist church began meeting in 1885 and built a church in 1907; a Catholic church was built in 1890, destroyed by Clyde's first tornado in 1895, and was later rebuilt. The local Church of Christ organized in the late 1880s and built its first building in 1904. Clyde had a population of 459 in 1910, some 610 in 1920, and 750 in 1925. At that time the town's forty-five businesses included five grocery stores, five dry goods stores, two banks, two drugstores, and two gins. In 1924 the transcontinental Bankhead Highway was routed through Clyde, facilitating faster transportation to nearby Abilene and consequently slowing Clyde's growth.