CORYELL CITY, TEXAS. Coryell City is on Farm Road 929 ten miles northeast of Gatesville in northeastern Coryell County. It was known as Rainey's Creek when the county was organized in 1854; a post office by that name began operating by the creek in 1857. By 1860 nearly seventy families lived in the Rainey's Creek vicinity. The community became known as Coryell in the early 1870s. By the 1880s Coryell had a church, a district school, two steam cotton gins, and 200 residents; area farmers shipped cotton, wool, and grain. Coryell grew slowly through the first third of the 1900s, but after the late 1930s it began to decline. The number of residents fell from a peak of 406 in 1939 to 150 in 1943. The population was reported to be 175 from the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s and 125 from 1968 through 2000. The post office at Coryell City was discontinued in 1958, and mail for the community was sent to Gatesville and Valley Mills.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Coryell County Genealogical Society, Coryell County, Texas, Families, 1854-1985 (Dallas: Taylor, 1986). John J. Germann and Myron Janzen, Texas Post Offices by County (1986). Zelma Scott, History of Coryell County (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1965).

Vivian Elizabeth Smyrl