Established as a railroad town in 1870 on the Houston and Texas Central Railway, the town incorporated in 1873 on land donated by the son and daughter of General José Antonio Mexía, Mexican senator, soldier, and promoter of Texas colonization. About 1885, Robert Munger developed a new cotton ginning process here before relocating to Dallas. Mexia was a boomtown in the 1910s and 1920s, the center of a large oil and natural gas discovery. A camp for German prisoners of war of Field Marshall Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps was located nearby in 1942. Today, Mexia serves as a commercial center for smaller rural towns in the county.
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