Some towns in Texas get their names from food

By Dr. Tommy Stringer Texas towns get their names from a variety of sources. Some are named for prominent Texans such as Houston and Austin. Others are named for cities in other parts of the world such as Paris and Athens. Some settlers were so impressed with their new homes they gave them positive names such as Joy, Comfort, Utopia, and Happy, but there are other communities have names that hare hard to explain. For example, some are named for food products. According to the Handbook of Texas, the community of Oatmeal is located in Burnet County in the Texas Hill Country. A family named Habermill settled in the vicinity around 1850 and may have provided the town’s unusual name. “Haber” is a German dialect word for oats. One other possibility for the name’s origin is that it is a perversion of the name of a Mr. Othneil, who... [read full story]