ANTHONY, TEXAS (El Paso County). Anthony is on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway and State Highway 20 sixteen miles northwest of downtown El Paso on the Texas-New Mexico border in El Paso County. It was reportedly named by a Mexican-American woman who built a chapel to St. Anthony of Padua sometime before 1884. A post office was established on the El Paso County side in March of that year but was never in operation. The Texas community later became known as La Tuna, after the Federal Correctional Institution located there, at which a post office was open from 1932 to 1965. In the early 1940s the population was estimated at only twenty, but ten years later, after the community incorporated as Anthony, the population estimate had grown to 1,200. It declined to 1,082 in the early 1960s, then grew to 2,154 in the early 1970s, 2,640 in the early 1980s, and 3,328 in 1990. The population grew to 3,850 in 2000. A post office was established in Anthony in 1981. In 1988 the Anthony Chamber of Commerce named the town the Leap Year Capital of the World, and the Worldwide Leap Year Birthday Club, open to anyone born on February 29, had more than 100 members by 1992.
