Buda started as 'Du Pre' and may be named for a pair of widows

On April 1, 1881, Cornelia Trimble donated land for a townsite at a new International-Great Northern Railroad depot, and a town began to gather around the tracks. The pull was immediate: nearby Mountain City emptied out as its residents and businesses flocked to the depot. That's a pattern you see all over Central Texas: the railroad decided which settlements lived and which faded, and Mountain City drew the short straw.

The town first went by Du Pre. In 1887, at the post office's request, it was renamed Buda. The likely origin is a small, very Texas story: the place had built a reputation as a good eating stop, and the name may trace to the Spanish 'viuda,' meaning widow, said to honor a pair of widows who cooked for travelers at the Carrington Hotel in the 1880s.

Set Buda next to Kyle and San Marcos and you can read the whole corridor on a map — three towns strung along a rail-and-road line that still funnels daily traffic up toward Austin, each one born of the same railroad that came through in the early 1880s.