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Odessa: From Ukraine to Texas

Although there’s no official record of how Odessa, Texas got its name, the city’s name can be traced back to Ukrainian immigrants in the 1800s

ODESSA, Texas — Although there’s no official record of how Odessa, Texas got its name, we can trace the city’s name back to those Ukrainian immigrants in the 1800s who called West Texas home while building the railroad.

“Immigrants are brought in by the thousands to build these railroads, because at the time, the United States, and it still for the most part is, we were land rich and labor poor,” said Associate Professor of History and Dean of Student Success Michael Frawley. 

Working on the railroad was hard labor, but it was steady labor. And it was something most Americans didn’t want to do themselves. 

“So the standard story is that Odessa was founded as a railroad town, as a stopping point, on one of the big Texas railroads that was being built across Texas at that time," Professor Frawley said. "The story is that there were a lot of Russian/Ukrainian immigrants working on the railroad at that time, and they thought that the plains of West Texas looked a lot like the plains of back home, and so the name Odessa started to be used for this area.”

The West Texas land made an impression on the homesick immigrants. So calling the tiny railroad camp Odessa was a way to remember a home that was halfway around the globe, and although the two cities share a name, they are not sister cities. 

“We think about this globalization as a relatively recent phenomenon, but Texas has always had a global reach," Professor Frawley said. "Texas has always been important to the geopolitical scene. And it’s just really interesting to see how throughout our history, we’ve had these… and if you go across Texas you will find stories like this of different immigrant groups and different settlers and how connected and how small the world really is when you’re looking at stuff like connecting Odessa, Texas and Odessa, Ukraine. Like, it’s just phenomenal that these connections have existed for so long.”

The world is an awfully small place.

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