The History of Burleson, Texas

Burleson owes its start to the railroad. In the 1880s, Grenville Dodge — the famed railroad builder — bought land for a depot from a local minister, Rev. Henry C. Renfro. As part of the deal, Renfro got to name the town, and he chose to honor his old teacher: Rufus Columbus Burleson, the Baptist minister and longtime president of Baylor University. So the town carries the name of a man whose real work was down in Waco; his connection to the place was a grateful former student with naming rights. Burleson grew up as a small farming and shipping community around the tracks.

For most of the 20th century Burleson was a modest agricultural town on the southern edge of Tarrant County, straddling the line into Johnson County. It had its Old Town main street, its churches, and its farms, and it grew slowly in Fort Worth's shadow without ever being swallowed by it. The pace was small-town, the economy was rural, and not much about it made the papers.

Two things changed Burleson. First, Fort Worth's southward sprawl turned it into a fast-growing suburb, its population climbing into the tens of thousands as subdivisions filled the fields along I-35W. Second, a local girl named Kelly Clarkson — who grew up in Burleson and graduated from Burleson High School — won the first season of American Idol in 2002 and became a Grammy-winning star, putting the town's name in front of the whole country. Burleson kept its Old Town district as an anchor while growing into a full-fledged suburb, quietly proud of its most famous graduate.