Cyclone, TX

Cyclone, on the Cyclone Branch of Camp Creek and on Farm Road 964, is eleven miles east of Temple in eastern Bell County. The community was founded about 1883 by several Czech families. A post office was opened there in 1886, and, according to popular tradition, the settlers opted to name it Cyclone because when they gathered to decide on its name, one of them quipped that "it would take a cyclone to get this bunch together." In 1890 Cyclone had a general store and seventy-five inhabitants. A gin and mill was operating in the town by 1892, the Cyclone school had forty-two pupils and one teacher in 1903, and the population of the town had grown to a peak of 102 in 1904. The Cyclone post office closed in 1906. The community had four businesses as late as 1948. In the mid-1960s businesses included a grocery store and a blacksmith shop, and Cyclone had approximately eighty inhabitants in scattered dwellings. Its population dropped to fifty-five in 1968, and by that time the blacksmith shop had closed. The population of Cyclone was reported as forty-five in 1990 and 2000. In the early 2000s the store still remained in business under the name Cyclone Corral.