Local Stories in Texas
107 places·3 counties·Page 1 of 3
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History·Brewster County
Albion Shepard
Marathon was named by a retired sea captain who thought the country looked Greek. Albion E. Shepard came to the Trans Pecos in the early 1880s as a surveyor laying out the railroad between El Paso and San Antonio, having spent his working life on ships, and tradition holds that when the new siding needed a name he offered Marathon, after the plain in Attica where the mountains come down to the sea.
History·Terrell County
Baxter's Curve
Baxter's Curve is a bend in the railway roughly midway between Dryden and Sanderson, and it is where one of the last major train robberies in West Texas went wrong for the men attempting it. Just after midnight on 13 March 1912, Ben Kilpatrick and Ole Hobek boarded Southern Pacific train number nine at Dryden, put on masks once the town was behind them, and took the engineer and crew hostage.
History·Burnet County
Birdie Harwood
Marble Falls elected a woman mayor in April 1917, eleven months before white women could vote in a Texas primary and three years before the Nineteenth Amendment, which means Ophelia Geraldine Crosby Harwood was put into office entirely by men. She campaigned on the argument that running a town was like running a household, and that rich men did not want the job while poor men could not afford it. She promised to make two nickels grow where one grew before, and to grade and light the streets.
History·Gillespie County
Braeutigam's Garten
The United States Army built a post on Barons Creek in December 1848 and gave it up in December 1853, the frontier line having moved west past it. What happened to the buildings afterwards is the better half of the story. Johann Wolfgang Braeutigam had come over in 1845 as a boy of sixteen, with his parents and two sisters, and married Christine Kensing in 1850. In 1870 he moved the family into the abandoned fort and opened a beer garden in it, with a saloon and a dance hall.
History·Dallas County
Browder Springs
Dallas owes its life as a rail city to a sentence slipped into a Texas legislative bill in 1871. The Houston and Texas Central was building north and would reach the town the following year. The Texas and Pacific, building west from Marshall along the thirty second parallel, intended to cross it near Corsicana, some fifty miles to the south. A Dallas representative, John W.
History·Burnet County
Burnam's Hole
A limestone shaft in Burnet County was called Burnam's hole until sometime after the Civil War, and then it acquired the name it carries now, because of what was thrown down it. The state marker at the mouth says the pit is believed to have received up to seventeen bodies, and names the pro-Union judge John R. Scott, a German settler called Adolph Hoppe, several Reconstruction era county officials, and Ben McKeever, who had a conflict with local freedmen.
Military·Washington County
Camp Felder
Camp Felder was a Confederate cavalry camp on New Year Creek land belonging to Gabriel Felder, who gave it his name, and it was in use as early as November 1863. The ground had previously been a Methodist camp meeting site. For about one month in the autumn of 1864 it was something else: a prison for Union soldiers. They had been moved out of Camp Groce near Hempstead to a camp near Bellville and then on to Camp Felder, in September 1864, specifically to get them away from a fever epidemic.
Military·Brewster County
Camp Peña Colorado
The United States Army put a post at the springs on Peña Colorada Creek in August 1879, about four miles southwest of where Marathon would later stand, and kept it for thirteen years. The siting was deliberate on several counts at once: the place lay on the road between Fort Clark and Fort Davis, on the surveyed route of the coming transcontinental railroad, and within supporting distance of Fort Stockton and Fort Davis both.
History·Washington County
Camptown Settlement
Camptown was Brenham's first Black neighbourhood, on ground east of the courthouse square. The earliest known reference to it is from 1850, when the brush along the creeks there sheltered runaway slaves, and freedpeople settled it in earnest after emancipation. Mount Rose Missionary Baptist Church was organised there in 1868, and the community built the institutions segregation gave it no other way to get: its own churches, its own businesses and eventually its own college.
History·Washington County
Captain McNelly's Grave
Leander H. McNelly is buried in a five acre Baptist burying ground off a farm road in Washington County, under a monument raised by public subscription among the citizens of South Texas. He was thirty three when he died of tuberculosis on the fourth of September 1877, and almost everything he is remembered for happened in the previous three years.
History·Fayette County
Carmine, Once Sylvan
The town was platted under the name Sylvan, and the name it carries now is not a colour. It was renamed for Newton Carmean, and on the fifteenth of June 1892 the spelling was deliberately changed from Carmean to Carmine, because the post office kept confusing it with Cameron, up in Milam County. A town changed its own name by one letter to stop its mail going astray. The townsite was established by Dr. B. J.
History·Austin County
Celia Allen's Bake Oven
Celia Allen was an enslaved cook in San Felipe de Austin who was freed in 1832 and then went on cooking in the same town for wages, managing a bake oven and working in the bakery that served as a gathering place until the town burned in 1836. The Texas Historical Commission has recovered the names of just under seventy enslaved people brought into Austin's colony in the 1820s and 1830s, and has been able to reconstruct four of those lives in any detail. Hers is one.
Music History·Dallas County
Central Track
Central Avenue was a street that had been a railroad, and everyone who used it called it Central Track. When the Houston and Texas Central laid its line north out of Dallas in 1872 the right of way became an address, and the Black district that grew along it ran north from Elm Street into what was then the edge of town.
History·Dallas County
Clyde Barrow's Grave
Clyde Barrow lies beside his older brother Buck in Western Heights Cemetery, just south of the Trinity on Fort Worth Avenue, under one headstone reading GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN. By the family's account the wording was Clyde's, chosen for Buck, who took a bullet through the head at a motor court in Platte City, Missouri in July 1933, was shot again five days later when a posse cornered the gang at Dexfield Park in Iowa, and died at a hospital in Perry, Iowa on the twenty ninth of July.
Film History·Dallas County
Dallas Film Row
For half a century the film trade of North Texas ran out of a few blocks on the southeast edge of downtown Dallas. The studios kept exchanges in these streets, warehouses where prints were stored, shipped out to small town theatres across Texas and into Oklahoma and New Mexico, then shipped back to be inspected and repaired by hand.
History·Harris County
Diamond Glenn
On St Patrick's Day 1949 the wildcatter Glenn McCarthy opened the Shamrock, an eighteen storey hotel of eleven hundred rooms decorated throughout in sixty three shades of green, on what was then the empty southern edge of Houston. It was the largest hotel built in the United States in the 1940s, it cost about twenty one million dollars, and McCarthy flew and railed a hundred and seventy five film stars in from Los Angeles for the opening.
History·Fayette County
Dr. Primm's Will
Dr. William Primm was born in Stafford County, Virginia in 1778 and bought his first league of Fayette County land from William and Stacy Barton in 1835, for six thousand dollars. He went on buying, and died in 1865 holding more than eight thousand acres in the county. He worked none of it himself, having brought enslaved people up from Louisiana to do that. In 1817, in Ohio, he had freed a woman named Celia.
History·Terrell County
Dryden
Dryden began in 1882 as a section house, which is the smallest thing a railroad builds that people can live in, and it was named for Eugene E. Dryden, the chief engineer of the line being pushed west across what is now Terrell County. What turned it into a town was cattle rather than track. In 1884 the Pecos Land and Cattle Company made Dryden its headquarters, and by 1886 its manager W. W.
Nature·Val Verde County
Eagle Nest Canyon
Eagle Nest Canyon, which runs up from the Rio Grande along the eastern edge of Langtry, holds one of the most important archaeological sites in North America. It is called Bonfire Shelter, and it lies about a kilometre up from the river junction behind a rampart of limestone blocks that fell from the roof and wall of the overhang. That collapse is the reason the site exists.
History·Val Verde County
Fate Bell Shelter
Fate Bell Shelter, in the canyon that gives Seminole Canyon State Park its name, is one of the largest rock shelters in the Lower Pecos, and its back wall carries some of the best preserved painting of its kind anywhere. The style is called Pecos River, and it is very old.
History·Colorado County
Gail Borden's Last Town
Gail Borden made his fortune on condensed milk by solving the problem of food that spoils. In the last years of his life he moved to a Colorado County settlement on Harvey's Creek, built houses on the hills above the water for himself, his sons and his brother John, and renamed the place Bordenville.
History·Travis County
Grassdale, Gregg, Manor
Three names in fifteen years, and the people living on the ground chose none of them. A post office called Grassdale opened in 1859 with James B. Manor as its postmaster, and closed again the following year. A second office opened in 1871 under the name Gregg, and was renamed Manor in 1872. What settled the question was the railroad.
Architecture·Dallas County
H.L. Hunt's Mount Vernon
The white colonnaded house on the eastern shore of White Rock Lake is a near replica of George Washington's Mount Vernon, slightly larger than the original, begun in 1928 and finished in 1930 by Thomas Y. Pickett, who built it for himself. H. L. Hunt bought it on 17 November 1937 for sixty nine thousand dollars and moved his family in on New Year's Day. Two peacocks, some chickens, a cow and a calf came with the place; Hunt added pecan trees and six deer. He lived there until he died in 1974.
Quirky·Gillespie County
Hondo Crouch
John Russell Crouch, who went by Hondo, after the town he was born in, bought a near abandoned village in the early 1970s and turned it into a joke that outlived him. He had been a serious athlete first: a Southwest Conference champion swimmer at the University of Texas, a two time All American and team captain who competed in western clothes and was known as the Swimming Cowboy. He wrote about six hundred columns for the Comfort News between 1963 and 1975 under the name Peter Cedarstacker.
History·Llano County
Jack Hays's Stand
In 1936 the state of Texas cast a claim in bronze that its own parks department now declines to vouch for. The plaque, which hangs in the park headquarters at the foot of the dome, says that in the autumn of 1841 Captain John C. Hays was cut off from his ranging company on the summit, surrounded by Comanches, and repulsed the whole band with such heavy losses that they fled.
History·Travis County
Jackson Morrow's Littig
The town stands on land given by a man who had been owned. Littig was established in 1883 along the Houston and Texas Central line in eastern Travis County, about six miles east of Manor, on acreage donated by Jackson Morrow, who had been enslaved and who bought some two thousand acres from the same plantation where he had been held. The town took its name instead from A. B.
History·Dallas County
Joppa Freedmen's Town
Joppa was established in 1872 by freed people from the Miller plantation, among them Henry Critz Hines, and it is one of the few freedmen's settlements in Texas still occupied on the ground it was built on. Hines had been brought to Texas from Alabama by his own owner and placed with the planter William Brown Miller for safekeeping until the war ended.
History·Presidio County
Juana Pedraza's Fort
Fort Leaton is named for Ben Leaton, a freighter on the Chihuahua road, the wagon route from the Gulf at Indianola to Presidio del Norte and on to Chihuahua City. In 1848 he bought an adobe compound at La Junta from Juan Bustillos, who had lived in it since 1830, and made it a private fortress and trading post: an L about two hundred feet along its river side, walls a foot and a half thick, a crenellated parapet around some forty rooms. Leaton was dead by 1851.
Education·Gillespie County
Junction School
Lyndon Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act on 11 April 1965 at a picnic table on the lawn of the one room schoolhouse where he had started school fifty three years earlier, and he asked his first teacher to sit beside him while he did it. Kate Deadrich Loney had taught him in 1912, when he was four years old.
History·Washington County
La Bahia's Turnverein
This hamlet is named after a Spanish road, and it was settled by Germans. The La Bahia Road was an east to west Indian trail long before anyone wrote it down, presumably known to Europeans as early as 1690, and later extended to Washington on the Brazos and to Goliad.
Nature·Presidio County
La Junta de los Rios
The Rio Grande reaches Presidio nearly spent, most of it drawn off upstream in New Mexico and the El Paso valley, and the hundred and fifty miles above it run dry often enough to be called the Forgotten Reach. What refills the river is the Rio Conchos, which comes down out of the Sierra Madre Occidental and joins it a few miles northwest of town; between sixty nine and eighty six per cent of the water below Presidio is Conchos water.
History·Dallas County
La Reunion Cemetery
In 1855 some two hundred French, Belgian and Swiss colonists settled three miles west of the village of Dallas, on the south bank of the Trinity, to build a cooperative community called La Reunion. It was organised on the theories of Charles Fourier and promoted by Victor Considerant, whose book Au Texas had appeared in Paris the year before urging Europeans to follow him. They governed themselves by general assembly.
Entertainment·Dallas County
Lake Cliff Park
For seven years Lake Cliff advertised itself as the greatest amusement park in the Southwest, and it was built to sell real estate. Charles Mangold and John Zang, whose name is on the boulevard, put together a syndicate that bought some fifty acres on the Oak Cliff side of the Trinity, and the park opened on 4 July 1906 with buildings by the Dallas architects Lang and Witchell. Twelve thousand people came through the gates that first night.
History·Washington County
Little Rocky Creek
On 19 November 1854 Sam Houston was baptised in Little Rocky Creek by Rufus C. Burleson, the Baptist minister who was then president of Baylor University at Independence. Houston was sixty one, a sitting United States senator, and had spent most of his life conspicuously outside any church. His wife Margaret and her mother Nancy Lea had been working on him for years, and he joined Independence Baptist Church after hearing Burleson preach.
History·Pecos County
Longfellow
Longfellow, in the extreme southern corner of Pecos County, is the third of the railroad water stops along this line to have emptied out for the same reason, and its dates tell the story almost without commentary. The railroad named it, around 1881, for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, which makes a nice pairing with Pumpville sixteen miles down the track: one station named for a poet and one for a piece of machinery.
Industry & Science·Bastrop County
McDade Pottery
Before refrigeration, a household in this country kept its food alive inside fired clay, and for half a century a good deal of that clay came from McDade. The works descended from a jug shop started in 1853 near what is now Bastrop State Park, which moved to McDade in the late 1870s to be nearer better clay. The deposits that mattered lay along Marshy Branch, four miles east of town. Robert L.
Education·Washington County
Mission Institute
The Southern German Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church opened Mission Institute in Brenham on 28 March 1883, to train ministers for its own mission field. In 1889 it was renamed Blinn Memorial College for the Reverend Christian Blinn of New York, whose gift had built its main hall. For fifty years it was a Methodist church school, and when the church withdrew its support in 1933 the people of Brenham ran it privately for four years more. What made it unusual came in 1937.
Education·Travis County
Montopolis Negro School
A storm destroyed the original Montopolis Negro School in 1935, along with several of the county's white schools. St. Edward's Baptist Church secured a surplus army barracks building as a replacement and deeded the land on Montopolis Drive to Travis County for school purposes. Local tradition says the barracks came from Camp Swift, but the building's National Register nomination points out that Camp Swift did not exist until 1942, so where it actually came from remains an open question.
History·Washington County
Old Baylor's Columns
The four stone columns standing on a hill at Independence are the most photographed thing Baylor University owns, and they are almost always captioned as the remains of Baylor University. That is half right in a way that matters. Baylor was chartered by the Congress of the Republic of Texas on 1 February 1845 and opened at Independence the following year. In 1851 it split into a male department and a female department on two separate hills, the men on Windmill Hill and the women on Academy Hill.
History·Bastrop County
Paige's Seven Cotton Gins
Paige is named for the engineer who drew the line it sits on. Norman Paige laid out the route of the Houston and Texas Central through this part of Bastrop County, and in 1872 a water tower stop on that route took his name. A post office followed in 1874, and the station moved three miles east in 1876.
History·Blanco County
Pedernales Electric Co-op
The Rural Electrification Administration would not serve the Hill Country because of an arithmetic rule: it wanted three families per mile of line, and the country between Johnson City and Fredericksburg had nothing like that. Lyndon Johnson, elected to Congress in a special election in April 1937 at the age of twenty eight, got an audience with Franklin Roosevelt and had the density requirement eased.
History·Bastrop County
Puesta del Colorado
Bastrop exists because of a shallow place in the Colorado River. A rock shoal downstream gave the crossing a firm bottom, and the Old San Antonio Road detoured about a quarter of a mile up Gills Branch to use the creek's gentle banks rather than scale the Colorado's steep east bank directly. Spanish soldiers built a small post at the ford and called it Puesta del Colorado.
History·Val Verde County
Pumpville
Pumpville exists because steam locomotives drink. In 1882 the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway, building the line that became the Southern Pacific, put a water stop on a stretch of West Texas where surface water is close to theoretical, and a settlement grew around the job of keeping the tanks full. It was called Samuels at first. Only after wells were sunk did the name change, in 1887, to the plainer description of what the place did. Then the reason evaporated.
History·Blanco County
Round Mountain
Joseph Bird settled between Cypress Creek and the Pedernales in about 1854 with his wife Eliza and six children, built a log house, and gave his name to a settlement called Birdtown that had been renamed Round Mountain by the time its post office opened in 1857, the second in what became Blanco County.
Entertainment·Fayette County
Round Top's Rifle Hall
The German inhabitants of Round Top organised a Schuetzen Verein in 1873, a shooting and social club of the kind common in the old country. It bought five and a half acres in 1881 and doubled that nine years later, built a dance hall in 1882, made the grounds the home of the town's long running Fourth of July celebration and called the place Schuetzen Park. In its early years the park had a bowling alley, a carousel, a saloon, an ice cream stand and a place to tie up a horse.
History·Gillespie County
Sauer-Beckmann Farm
A good cotton crop in 1915 paid for the Victorian house at the Sauer-Beckmann farmstead, and the price of it is recorded: a thousand dollars, in a year when cotton went from nine cents a pound to twenty in a single month. Emil and Emma Beckmann used that money first to buy out Emil's brother Otto's share of the farm, then to put up a new barn, add a frame room onto the old rock structure, and build connecting porches and decorative pressed tin.
Entertainment·Fayette County
Shakespeare At Winedale
University of Texas undergraduates have been performing Shakespeare in a converted hay barn in rural Fayette County since 1970, and the reason is that an oil heiress looked at the barn and saw the Globe. Ima Hogg had bought the old Lewis place in 1963 and spent the next four years restoring it, using timber cut on the farm itself. She had already had the barn fitted out as a theatre, with vented side panels, part of the loft taken out for balconies and a two tiered stage.
History·Val Verde County
Sotol City
Comstock, in western Val Verde County, is a town on its second site and its second name. It was platted as Sotol City, east of where it stands now, presumably after the spiky desert plant that covers these hills, though no record actually says so. When the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway pushed through the county in 1882 and 1883, the whole townsite was moved to reach water from a natural lake nearby, and it took a new name from John B. Comstock, a railroad dispatcher.
History·Terrell County
Strawbridge
Sanderson was called Strawbridge first, and not after the man who founded it. Charlie Wilson, an ex soldier and saloon keeper, set up where the Southern Pacific surveyors had marked a division point in 1881, the sort of place a railroad needs every hundred miles or so to change crews and service engines. The name on it, though, was the railroad's from the beginning: J. H. Strobridge, the construction superintendent who had driven the building of the transcontinental line.
Museums & Art·Washington County
Texas Cotton Gin Museum
Thirteen farmers raised ten thousand dollars by selling two hundred shares at fifty dollars apiece, formed the Burton Farmers Gin Association in 1913, and built this gin the following year for eleven thousand eight hundred and thirty five dollars and ten cents, more than they had raised.