| ANTHONY, TEXAS
(El Paso County). Anthony is on the
Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway and
State Highway 20 sixteen miles northwest of
downtown El Paso on the Texas-New Mexico
border in El Paso County. It was reportedly
named by a Mexican-American woman who built
a chapel to St. Anthony of Padua sometime
before 1884. A post office was established
on the El Paso County side in March of that
year but was never in operation. The Texas
community later became known as La Tuna,
after the Federal Correctional Institutionqv
located there, at which a post office was
open from 1932 to 1965. In the early 1940s
the population was estimated at only twenty,
but ten years later, after the community
incorporated as Anthony, the population
estimate had grown to 1,200. It declined to
1,082 in the early 1960s, then grew to 2,154
in the early 1970s, 2,640 in the early
1980s, and 3,328 in 1990. A post office was
established in Anthony in 1981. In 1988 the
Anthony Chamber of Commerce named the town
the Leap Year Capital of the World, and the
Worldwide Leap Year Birthday Club, open to
anyone born on February 29, had more than
100 members by 1992.
Martin Donell Kohout
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