Braintree

Braintree, Texas is a fictional town and location in The Stand by Stephen King. It is a small town upon which nearby Arnette, which is much smaller although it plays a much larger role in the story, relies for hospitals, schools and police.

History and Demographics
Braintree is its county seat and contains the hospitals, coroner's offices, a small airport and the Texas State Patrol station. It also contains stockyards.

Assuming Arnette is based on the real-life Arnett, Texas in Coryell County, Braintree would therefore be based loosely on Gatesville. In the 1980 U.S. Census, Gatesville had a population of 6,078, but by 1990, that had nearly doubled to 11,492 people. Most of Gatesville's growth in the 1980s was due to the establishment of Texas Department of Criminal Justice prisons in that decade. As the original novel was written in the 1970s, long before those prisons were scheduled to be built, and as there is no reference in the Complete and Uncut Edition to prisons having recently been built there, it is fair to assume the fictional Braintree's population grew naturally in the 1980s without any population booms, other than perhaps a small influx of Arnette residents put out of work by the closing of the paper plant and shrinking of the calculator factory. That would place Braintree's pre-Captain Trips population at roughly 7,500.

In Story
Young Stu Redman, when he was about 10 to 12, lied about his age to get his first minimum wage job in the stockyards there.

When Charles Campion crashes at Hapscomb's Texaco just outside Arnette, he dies on the way to the hospital in Braintree, where he is examined by Finnegan the coroner, who calls in Dr. James of the Texas State Health Department, who in turns calls the federal Centers for Disease Control center in Atlanta.

Complete and Uncut Edition

 * Chapter 1 - referenced
 * Chapter 3 - referenced