Settlers began arriving in western Denton County in the 1850s seeking rich agricultural land. Silas Christal, his wife Mary Elizabeth Burnett, and their twelve children came from Missouri in 1855, and Christal built an ox-driven mill to grind corn and, in 1880, a school on his property. The town was established as Gerald in 1886 when the Gulf, Colorado, and Santa Fe Railway created a line from Fort Worth to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma, but it was renamed Ponder because another Texas town was already named Gerald, honoring prominent landowner William A. Ponder. The Denton Creek system gave settlers ample resources and fertile land for growing wheat, corn, oats, and cotton, and in the late 1800s Baptist, Methodist, and Church of Christ congregations formed to serve the growing community. In 1894, Cornelius N. Skaggs opened Ponder's first business, a store and post office, and became the second postmaster. The town quickly grew around the railway, gaining general stores, a lumber yard, cotton gin, mill, bank, and hotel. In 1897 H.F. Wakefield donated land for a school, and since the 1930s and 1940s community activities such as boys high school basketball and the Ponder rodeo, organized in 1939 by Chester January, Sidney Ford, and Dr. M.L. Holland, have helped bring the town together. These local activities, businesses, education, and religious groups continued the traditions and spirit of the small rural town after its incorporation in 1966.