The History of Nash, Texas

Nash emerged in the 1870s around the junction of a branch line of the Texas and Pacific Railway, running up from Marshall, and the main line that crossed Bowie County from east to west. In its earliest days the spot was known simply as Transcontinental Junction, or sometimes Texarkana Junction — a railroad crossing rather than a proper town.

When a post office opened in 1884, it was first named Park, after John N. Parker, the first postmaster. By 1890 the little settlement had a store, a pharmacy, two mills, a cotton gin, and about 100 residents — a modest trade point serving the surrounding farm country and the railroad that ran through it.

The town took its lasting name in 1906, when the Park post office was renamed Nash in honor of Martin 'Manny' Nash, a division superintendent for the Texas & Pacific Railroad Company. The name reflected the community's identity: a place defined by the railroad and the men who ran it.

By 1900 the population had reached 487, and for the next fifty years it held fairly steady. Like many small East Texas towns, Nash also weathered disaster — an 1894 cyclone destroyed roughly a third of the town and killed two people — but it endured as a quiet railroad community on the approach to Texarkana.

Nash incorporated as a city in the 1950s, and its later growth was tied less to the railroad than to Texarkana's steady expansion. As the metro spread west along Highway 82, Nash became a suburb — close to the jobs of the area's military installations and industrial plants, yet keeping its own small-town footprint of a few square miles.

Today Nash is a growing industrial suburb of around 3,800 people, home to manufacturing and production businesses and bordered by Texarkana and Wake Village. Its children attend Texarkana ISD schools, and its economy is woven into the larger Texarkana region — a long way from the lonely rail junction where it started, but still anchored to the same crossroads.