Land around Rice, on Interstate 45

Dallas is about fifty miles north on the same road and Ennis is the next town up it. A tract two minutes off an exit is bought by people who are not farming it. A tract four miles east on a county road, inside the same school district, sells to somebody else entirely and at a different number.

Most of this county was laid out by the Cotton Belt in 1881. Rice came a decade before that: the Houston and Texas Central reached it in 1872, and the town took the name of William Marsh Rice, a railroad owner who gave land for a church and a cemetery. In 1912 the Texas Electric Railway ran interurban cars from Dallas through town to Corsicana, and Rice incorporated the same year. Where those lines ran is still where the frontage is worth the most.

Champion Chatfield put a trading post in an oak grove on the San Antonio and Shreveport Trail in 1838, six miles west of Porter’s Bluff on the Trinity. Five hundred people in the 1890s, about forty at the last count. The oldest houses and the oldest roads in this corner of the county are out that way, and a title chain can start before the railroads did.

Ground in this district takes mail from four post-office zones: Rice, Chatfield, Corsicana and Ennis. A buyer shopping the schools, and an owner comparing his place with one down the road, should settle the district from the record rather than from the address. Here that line moves the price as much as it moves the bus route.