Founded through the efforts of A. Bledsoe of Kentucky, his son-in-law Roderick A. Rawlins, and Mrs. Mildred Parks Rawlins, Lancaster grew from the Rawlins family's arrival in 1844 and Bledsoe's settlement in 1846 into a town established about 1852 and named after the Kentucky town founded by Bledsoe's grandfather. Stores, a school, churches, a grist mill, tannery, cotton gin, and carding mill were soon built in or near its 1-square-mile townsite. During the Civil War, a Confederate pistol factory operated there. After 1876, a town well on the Square supplied water for citizens and visitors. Railroads arrived in 1888 and 1890. Randolph College, an enterprise of Randolph Clark, one of the founders of Texas Christian University, operated there from 1898 to 1900, and other schools used the college plant until it burned in 1912. Fires also destroyed some sections of the Square in 1877, 1889, and 1918. During its first century, Lancaster was a farmers' market town whose fortunes rose and fell with cotton yields and prices, and since 1950 it has had a broader economy and increased population.