The Texas legislature created Wichita County in 1858, and the town of Wichita Falls was platted in 1876. Growth was slow until 1882, when residents offered land concessions to the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway to route its line through the town. By the end of the nineteenth century, five railroads made Wichita Falls the transportation center for North Texas and south Oklahoma. Joseph A. Kemp and his brother-in-law Frank Kell, who came to Wichita Falls in 1883 and 1896, respectively, are credited with the town’s initial success. Their joint ventures encompassed railroads, utilities, a streetcar system, building development, and all the institutions of the first several decades of Wichita Falls’s history. Oil was discovered in Electra to the west in 1911, and the Burkburnett fields to the north brought on a full-fledged boom in 1918, but by 1962 oil refining activity had largely ceased.
Wichita Falls’s economy received support with the opening in 1941 of Sheppard Field, where the Army Air Corps trained as many as 46,000 personnel. Deactivated in 1946, the base reopened as Sheppard Air Force Base in 1948. As in the rest of the country, downtown Wichita Falls began to lose businesses with post–World War II suburban sprawl, beginning with the first shopping center in 1953, and in the 1950s and 1960s oil corporations moved from the city.
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