Marshall

More than perhaps any other town in East Texas, Marshall was a creation of the railroad. Strategically situated between Dallas and Shreveport, the town was an ideal base in the late 1800s for the Texas & Pacific Railway, which for nearly a century had many of its maintenance and repair operations in Marshall for trains heading west into the vast frontier. At its heyday nearly 3,000 people—roughly one-third the town's population at the time—worked for the "T & P." Trains still rumble along the tracks north of downtown, but the massive complex of machine shops that once hummed with the clanking of steam engines is long gone.