Wallis, Texas Was Called Bovine Bend: The History of the Town

Ask where the name Wallis comes from and most people will guess a founding family. It was a railway director, and the town went by something else entirely for its first four decades.

Settlement, and a post office called Bovine Bend

Anglo-American settlers took up the strip of land between the Brazos and the San Bernard rivers in the late 1830s. When the community got its first post office in 1873, the name on it was Bovine Bend.

The railroad arrives, and a new name

After 1880 the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway built its Galveston-Brenham spur through the area. The settlement became Wallis Station, named for J. E. Wallis, a director of the railway, and the post office followed suit in 1886.

A second line arrived in 1887 — the San Antonio and Aransas Pass, building east toward Houston — which put the town at a junction. Two railroads is a great deal of infrastructure for a place this size, and it is the reason Wallis grew when it did.

In 1911 the post office dropped "Station" and the town became plain Wallis.

The Czech families

From about 1890, Czech immigrants began settling the area, many arriving by way of Fayette County. Wallis is part of what is often called the Texas Czech belt, and that heritage is still visible in the surnames on the mailboxes and the headstones.

A century of counting

The population figures tell their own story:

• 1904 — about 631 residents
• 1925 — about 800
• 1943 — about 900, supporting thirty-nine businesses, the town's high-water mark for most of the century
• 1949 — down to about 690, a fall of more than two hundred in six years
• 1966 — recovered to about 1,075
• 1975 — eight churches, two schools, a bank, a public library and a weekly newspaper
• 1991 — about 1,411, the largest recorded estimate
• 2000 — 1,311 at the census
• 2020 — 1,292 at the census

Wallis has held between roughly one thousand and fourteen hundred people for sixty years. For a town that lost a third of its population in the late 1940s, that steadiness is worth noticing.

Where this comes from, and where it does not

The timeline above is drawn from the Handbook of Texas, published by the Texas State Historical Association, which is the standard reference for Texas local history. Our history page links to it directly.

One entry is not theirs. American Legion Post 200 was founded here in December 1933, and that comes from the Post's own records — it is marked as such on the page. We are not going to borrow the Handbook's authority for our own recollections.

Help us fill the gaps

A published reference work covers what got written down. It does not cover who ran the store, whose family built which house, or what the town did the week the war ended. If you have photographs, documents or recollections, we would like to hear from you — and names on the backs of photographs are worth more than you would think.

Read the full history of Wallis