FROST, TEXAS. Frost, at the junction of State Highway 22 and Farm Road 667, twenty miles west of Corsicana in northwestern Navarro County, was established in 1881, when the St. Louis Southwestern Railway built from Corsicana to Hillsboro. The town was named for Samuel R. Frost,^qv a local politician and attorney for the railroad. The tracks bypassed the nearby settlement of Crossroads, and within a short time all of the businesses in Crossroads moved to the new town. A post office opened in 1887, and Henry Jones established a school the following year. In 1890 Wylie N. Jones built a waterworks to supply the town from a nearby lake. He also built a small steamboat, at the time one of the few on an inland lake in Texas. By the early 1900s Frost had six cotton gins, an oil mill, several butcher shops, seven grocery stores, a number of dry-goods stores, two banks, and three drugstores; the estimated population in 1910 was 702. The town continued to prosper during the 1920s and reached a peak population of 913 in 1929. In 1930 a tornado killed twenty-two people in Frost and injured more than fifty. Much of the business district was destroyed. During the 1930s the community declined, partly because of the Great Depression^qv and residents' flight to the cities. By 1945 Frost had a population of 671 and twenty-five businesses. The decline continued during the 1950s and 1960s, to a low of 495 in 1966. In 1990 Frost had a population of 647 and eight businesses. In 2000 the population was 648.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Annie Carpenter Love, History of Navarro County (Dallas: Southwestern, 1933). Wyvonne Putman, comp., Navarro County History (5 vols., Quanah, Texas: Nortex, 1975-84).

Christopher Long