Go east of Dallas on Interstate 30 past Sulphur Springs until you reach U.S. Route 67. Take that east and before you reach Texarkana, you’ll arrive in a little town of about 1,000 named Ingersoll. Well, it was called Ingersoll.
The name was unofficially changed to Redwater about 10 years after its 1875 founding—a change that was made official by the post office almost a decade after that.
Founders of the town admired Robert Green Ingersoll and decided to name their town after him. You may have never heard of Ingersoll, but that’s only because you didn’t live in the late 1800s in America.
Back then, Ingersoll was one of the most famous people in the nation. He was friends with presidents and Mark Twain. He was a giant among politicians of the day, and any Republican who wanted to succeed at the national level needed and lusted after Ingersoll’s endorsement—and his oratorical talents.
Had he wanted to, he would have made a formidable candidate for the presidency himself, except for the little problem of his nickname: the Great Agnostic.
Despite Ingersoll’s reputation as a freethinker and anti-religious zealot, he was widely liked.
His central creed was this: “Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to make others so.”
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Ingersoll, a devoted reader of Shakespeare and, ironically, the Bible, was known as the most brilliant wordsmith of his age. He mesmerized audiences with his genius for creating poetic oratory. His voice was captivating in tone, and his articulation was flawless.
Ingersoll was ahead of his time. The New York native who served as the 16th attorney general of Illinois after commanding a Union cavalry regiment in the Civil War was an outspoken abolitionist and supported voting rights for Black people and women.
But Ingersoll’s fame died with him, in 1899. It seemed he would be confined to the century that had defined him.
Even in Texas. A revival meeting was held in the early 1890s in the East Texas town that was named for Ingersoll, and it was a mighty successful one.
That week 110 people were baptized, or “born again,” in the community. It suddenly became thoroughly devout and could not suffer the indignities of living under the name of a famous agnostic.
So they agreed to rename the town Redwater, after a well that had recently been dug there was found to yield red water. Perhaps they also saw some religious significance in the name. In the Old Testament’s telling, God parted the Red Sea to save Moses and the Israelites.
That’s how Ingersoll became Redwater and one more reason that the man himself became, as The Washington Post called him in 2012, “the most famous American you never heard of.”
