The little town of Leander, Texas, was only 26 years old when Anna Ray (Craven) Borho was born, and she has personally witnessed more than three-quarters of the now-booming city’s history. She was there when the first car arrived; she saw the first airplane in Leander – it landed in a field behind her home – and she remembers well when the electricity first was turned on in 1939. And since age 15, she has been a mainstay of the historic Leander Presbyterian Church, playing the piano almost every Sunday for more than eighty-five years!

Our story starts before Anna Ray or Leander were even thought of. It was all the way back in 1854 when an English couple named George and Jane Craven arrived in Texas and settled in “Bagdad Prairie,” on the western side of Williamson County. George was a wheelwright and wagon-builder; Jane became the very first pianist at the “Pleasant Hill Presbyterian Church.”

By 1880, Bagdad was a stage stop on the route between Austin and Lampasas, and the thriving community boasted a hotel, a school, several general stores, two blacksmith shops and several churches. But Bagdad was doomed by the caution of its business leaders; when the Austin & Northwestern Railroad began to build a track to Burnet in 1882, the little town opposed the idea, and the railroad went a mile to the east.

It didn’t take long for Bagdad residents to realize their mistake. They began moving their homes and businesses closer to the tracks, where the railroad company sold lots in a new town named for Leander “Catfish” Brown. The congregation from Pleasant Hill formed Leander Presbyterian in 1883.

Ranching, farming and cedar posts were the main industries in the young town, and Wesley Craven (son of George and Jane) built a cotton gin. By 1890, Leander’s population had grown to 329, and there was a thriving business district by the railroad tracks. Wesley Craven’s children carried on the family’s musical traditi ...

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