The History of DeKalb, Texas

According to county histories, a community began taking shape at the site in the winter of 1835, around the time David Crockett is said to have passed through on his way to the Alamo. As the story goes, when Crockett asked the name of the place, residents told him it had none and asked him to name it — and he suggested honoring the German-born Baron Johann de Kalb, a general who served and died in the American Revolution.

Whether or not the legend is exact in every detail, the name stuck, and DeKalb has carried it ever since. From the start the settlement had an unusual purpose: education. Several early settlers worked to persuade the Texas Congress to grant land for a school, and in 1839 that effort succeeded with the chartering of DeKalb College, built a few miles south of the town.

DeKalb's early prominence earned it a notable distinction: in 1841 it became the first county seat of Bowie County. The designation was temporary, however, while a commission searched for a more central permanent site. The commission settled on the town then called Boston, and the seat of government moved on, leaving DeKalb to grow at its own pace.

That pace was slow for decades. DeKalb remained a small frontier settlement in the cotton country of western Bowie County, waiting — like so many East Texas towns — for the railroad that would change its fortunes.

The railroad arrived in 1876, and DeKalb became a station town almost overnight. By 1884 the population had reached about 200, with two churches, a school, a cotton gin, and a sawmill-gristmill. By 1890 it had grown to 500, gaining a bank and a weekly newspaper as trade picked up along the rails.

Cotton ruled the nineteenth-century economy, but in the twentieth century DeKalb shifted toward vegetables, fruit, livestock, and hay — and became known for its cannery and its tomato shipments. The nearby Red River Army Depot later added steady employment to the area. The population passed 2,000 by 1960 and peaked at 2,217 in 1980 and has since declined to about 1,500 (1,527 in the 2020 census), leaving DeKalb a quiet farming and railroad town with deep Bowie County roots.