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Brownwood Bulletin
one street became known as Ò Battle Row.Ó A third railroad, the Brownwood North and South, was built in 1912 to connect Brownwood with the Brown County community of May, but the short-lived railroad lost money and was abandoned in 1927. Brownwood went through two boom periods in the first half of the 20th century, the first stimulated by the oil industry, the second by the building of a military installation during World War II. Oil was first discovered near Brownwood in 1917, but the town did not become a major oilindustry site until the 1920s. The population of the city shot up from 8,223 in 1920 to 12,789 in 1930, and estimates from the late 1920s indicate it might have been as high as 15,000. At one time during the boom the city had 25 manufacturing and industrial plants in operation. The city benefited from the completion of Lake Brownwood in 1933 and several area WPA projects. In 1940 Brownwood had 13,398 inhabitants, some 52 percent of the Brown County population. In the fall of 1940, as part of the military buildup associated with the peacetime draft, a military-training installation, Camp Bowie, was built to the south and southwest of town. The
Visitors Guide 2015
BULLETIN FILE PHOTO
Camp Bowie played a central part in World War II as it was a training facility and also housed prisoners of war.
camp eventually became the largest military training center in Texas, and had a major impact on the city of Brownwood. By December 1940 the 13,500 workers at the camp exceeded the 1940 population of the city; by March 1941 BrownwoodÕ s population was counted at 22,479, and by some estimates the wartime population eventually reached considerably more than 50,000. With the closing of Camp Bowie in 1946, BrownwoodÕ s wartime gains began to slip away. Attempts to sustain the growth rate of the war years were blocked by the seven-year drought of the late 1940s and early 1950s and its deleterious impact on the agribusiness of the region. In spite of the postwar depression, the city numbered 20,140 inhabitants, 71 percent of the county population, in 1950. Business revolved around wool, oil, poultry, livestock, peanuts and pecans. BrownwoodÕ s population declined during the 1950s by more than 15 percent to 16,974 in 1960, and has remained relatively static over the next 40 years, with 17,368 inhabitants in 1970, 19,203 in 1980, 18,387 in 1990, and 19,288 in 2010.