Troy, TX (Bell County)

Troy, also called New Troy, is on Interstate Highway 35 and the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad, seven miles north of Temple in northeastern Bell County. It grew up around the railway station after 1882 and supplanted an earlier community named Troy that was two miles north on Elm Creek. Some occupants of Old Troy refused to move to the new community site, and Old and New Troy coexisted for some time. By 1884 New Troy had 250 inhabitants and a post office, two churches, a gin and mill, three saloons, a hotel, and a cooperative association. In 1886 the town was struck by a cyclone that destroyed a store. The Troy Enterprise, a weekly newspaper, was founded about 1892. The population was estimated at 500 in 1900, and the Troy school was the largest district school in the county in 1903, when it had 171 pupils and four teachers. Troy continued to prosper as a shipping point for cotton, livestock, and the other agricultural products of the region. In 1931 it had twenty businesses and an estimated population of 450. The town declined in the 1930s to 219 inhabitants, where it remained until the 1960s. In 1960, when Troy incorporated, it had 275 residents, but it grew rapidly thereafter and had a population of 450 in 1968, 704 in 1978, and 1,581 in 1988. In 1990 the population was 1,395. The population dropped to 1,378 in 2000.