Barker

Barker is on Interstate Highway 10 seventeen miles west of downtown Houston in western Harris County. In 1895 the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad had laid tracks and was operating through Barker. The town was named for the track-laying contractor, Ed Barker. George Miller built two houses in early Barker. One was north of the railroad tracks and served as an inn. It was destroyed in the Galveston hurricane of 1900. The second house, south of the tracks, was a two-story home, store, telephone office, and post office. In 1898 Miller became the first postmaster of Barker. Barker had an inn, a brick factory, a twine mill, a general store, a telephone company, a depot, two churches, a one-room public school, and a saloon. By 1915, when the town's population was eighty, rice farming, dairying, and ranching were the chief occupations. Whole trainloads of cattle were shipped from Barker's shipping pens. The last dairy in the area became a residential subdivision in 1982. In 1985 the Texas Antiquities Committee awarded a state archeological landmark to the LH7 Ranch home, owned by the Emil Henry Marks family. In 1974 Park Ten Industrial Park developed a business park just north of the Katy Railroad tracks. By the 1990s Trendmaker had two multistory office buildings in Barker just south of Interstate 10, where rice once grew and cattle grazed in the 1970s. The population in Barker stood at 100 from 1925 to 1949, when it declined to fifty. From 1972 to 1990 the census reported a population of 160. In 2000 population figures increased dramatically to 2,500. No numbers were available for the unincorporated community in 2010.