Wortham's Name Starts With a Five-Dollar Railroad Right-of-Way

At the west edge of Freestone County, Wortham begins with a rail line and a bargain. Robert B. Longbotham held the land grant where the town sits. When the Houston and Texas Central Railway planned a route through the area in 1871, he sold the right of way for five dollars. Investors platted a townsite and gave it the name Tehuacana.

The post office changed the name to Long Bottom, a bent version of Longbotham, then the settlement became Wortham in 1874 for Col. Rice Wortham, the merchant tied to getting the railroad through. Before the oil boom made the place jump in the 1920s, it was a cotton market with grist mills, corn mills, cotton gins, a store, and a handful of people.

That older Wortham is easy to miss if you hear the oil-field story by itself. The name carries a quieter chain: a land grant, a five-dollar right-of-way, a railroad merchant, and a small cotton town waiting on the west side of the county before the boom.