24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Rotan, TX

Rotan is a city in northwestern Fisher County, Texas, near the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos River at the junction of State Highways 70 and 92, and it is the county's largest community even though the county seat is Roby.

Rotan began as a settlement called White Flat, named for the powdery white gypsum sand lying near the surface of the land, and it existed before Fisher County was organized in 1886.

When the Texas Central Railroad made the town its western terminus in 1906, White Flat was renamed Rotan in honor of Ed Rotan, a major stockholder in the railroad, and the town incorporated in 1909.

The Rotan Gypsum Plant was built in 1923 to mine and process the area's abundant gypsum, and gypsum remains part of the local economy alongside agribusiness and an oil mill.

By 1930 Rotan had grown to about 1,638 residents and 100 businesses as the trade center for northern and western Fisher County, and its population peaked at about 3,160 in 1950.

Rotan has declined steadily with the farm economy ever since, falling to 1,332 residents at the 2020 census, living in 591 households, with a median age of 48.

Rotan High School's teams are the Yellowhammers, one of the most unusual mascots in American high school sports; the name apparently evolved from a claw hammer pictured in the school's early 1920s yearbooks into the yellowhammer bird.

Rotan High School plays six-man football, the small-school Texas game, under the Rotan Independent School District, which also reaches into small parts of Kent and Stonewall counties.

The railroad that created Rotan ended passenger service in the 1920s and was discontinued entirely in the late 1970s.