DELHI, TEXAS. Delhi is on Farm Road 304 nineteen miles southeast of Lockhart in eastern Caldwell County. The fine sandy loam soils in the area have made it ideal for agriculture and livestock raising. From 1873 to 1929 Delhi had a post office. In 1880 a Primitive Baptist church was established there and a year later a permanent cemetery. In 1884 Delhi reported a population of 150, two gristmills, two cotton gins, and a school. By 1890 the population had reached 200, but it had declined to thirty by 1925, when a general store was in operation in the community. County highway maps for 1936 showed scattered dwellings and a school, a church, a cemetery, and a business at the townsite. By 1940 the population of Delhi had dropped to twenty-five. In 1951 the community opened the Delhi Community Center, which was still in use in 1990. Legend has it that Delhi was named for a traveling medicine man who stayed in the area for several months in the late nineteenth century. It was not labeled on county highway maps in 1990, though a church, the cemetery, and the community hall still marked the site. The population was 300 in 2000.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lennie White Baker, "Delhi," in Mark Withers Trail Drive Museum, Historical Caldwell County: Where Roots Intertwine (Dallas: Taylor, 1984).

Vanessa L. Davis