It was founded in 1854 by A. H. Dobkins and named in 1860, probably for the warning cry at Indian raids, "Double In," for the capital of Ireland, or for the double-log cabins used by early settlers. Growth increased in 1874 as Dublin acquired stagecoach service and a post office.
In 1881 the Texas Central Railroad was built through to Mount Airy, a few miles from Dublin. J. D. Bishop laid out a townsite on the line four miles south of Mount Airy, which drew residents from old to new Dublin. Within a year the new Dublin had forty-five businesses and sixty-five homes, so the railroad moved its depot from Mount Airy to new Dublin.
The town was incorporated on March 18, 1889. By 1890 the population was 2,025. It was 2,370 in 1900, 2,271 in 1930, 2,746 in 1950, 2,810 in 1970, 2,723 in 1980, and 3,190 in 1990. The town is a center for agriculture and industry, including oil and gas production, clothing factories, peanut shelling and drying plants, feed mills, milk processing, saddle and rope making, and metal stamping. Dublin has two city parks, the Lyon Museum, a public library, a hospital, and a nursing home.
It also has an airport, two railroads, a golf course, and recreational facilities at Proctor Reservoir.qv The town was one of the first in the state to have streetcars. It is the birthplace of golfer Ben Hogan, home of a world-championship rodeo, and the former home of the annual Grand Army of the Republic reunion.
The world's oldest bottler of Dr Pepper is the Dublin Bottling Works, still in operation, and the only place in the world that still uses cane sugar -- not corn syrup -- to sweeten it. If this doesn't sound very exciting to you, then you're obviously not one of the Dr Pepper faithful who travel here from all over the U.S. just to stock up on cases of the original formula.
In front of the plant is a statue, "Sweet Inspirations." It depicts the plant's owner, Bill Kloster -- "Mr. Dr Pepper" -- offering a bottle to a pigtailed little girl. Kloster believed in the original formula, and was the man responsible for keeping it here after every other bottler had gone over to the cheaper sweetener. When his wife told him that he was drinking too much cane sugar, he secretly had the regular Dr Pepper put into the diet bottles that he stocked in his home refrigerator. Kloster worked at Dublin Bottling Works for 67 years, from age 14 until the day he died in 1999, after a full day at the plant.