How a rejected post office petition gave a Texas cattle town its final name

Countries & Cities · Published 15 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Originally known as Bandana, this South Texas hub struggled to find a permanent identity. After a failed attempt to name the town after a local veteran, residents settled on the name of a rancher's wife. Today, the city is a vital center for the regional oil and music industries.

Alice, the county seat of Jim Wells County, was established in 1888. Its origins trace back to a nearby community called Collins, which had roughly 2,000 residents around 1880. When the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway sought to build a line through the area, the residents of Collins refused to sell their land. Consequently, the railroad shifted its path three miles west, leading to the creation of a depot named Bandana in 1883 at a junction with another railway line.

The town's naming process was surprisingly difficult. An initial application for a post office under the name Kleberg, honoring Battle of San Jacinto veteran Robert Justus Kleberg, was rejected because a town by that name already existed. Residents subsequently chose the name Alice, honoring Alice Gertrudis King Kleberg, the daughter of Richard King—the founder of the King Ranch—and wife of Robert Justus Kleberg Jr. By the time the post office opened in 1888, the population of the defunct Collins had largely relocated to the new, thriving cattle-shipping point.

The town's economy shifted significantly in the 1940s following the discovery of petroleum, which triggered a population boom. Beyond energy, Alice gained cultural prominence as the birthplace of Tejano music. In the mid-1940s, Armando Marroquin Sr. launched Ideal Records in the city, the first home-based company to record Tejano artists exclusively. This legacy continued with other labels like Freddie Records and Hacienda Records in the 1970s and 1980s. The city has also produced notable figures, including Nobel Prize winners Robert F. Curl Jr. and James P. Allison, as well as actress Lois Chiles.

Today, Alice serves as a distribution hub, earning the nickname Hub City due to its location between major metropolitan areas like Corpus Christi and Laredo. While it remains a center for the oil industry, with over 100 oil field companies in the area, it also maintains a quiet history of seismic activity, recording only two small earthquakes in recent decades: a 3.8-magnitude event in 1997 and a 4.0-magnitude quake in 2010.

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