Local Stories in Texas
107 places·3 counties·Page 2 of 3
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History·Val Verde County
The 1954 Pecos Flood
The highway bridge that carries US 90 over the Pecos River replaced one the river destroyed. In late June 1954 the remains of Hurricane Alice stalled over the Pecos drainage and dropped as much as twenty eight inches of rain on ground that could absorb almost none of it. The water came down the canyon as a wall. The gauge near Comstock read ninety six feet, which was fifty eight feet higher than anything ever recorded there, the previous maximum having stood at thirty eight feet since 1932.
History·Terrell County
The 1965 Flood
Sanderson is built in the mouth of a canyon, which is convenient for a railroad and dangerous for everything else. On the morning of 11 June 1965, after as much as nine inches of rain had fallen on the watershed above the town in two days, a fifteen foot wall of water came down Sanderson Canyon at about five past seven and went through the town.
Entertainment·Gillespie County
The Albert Dance Hall
Max Beckman built a tin clad dance hall with wooden beams and hinged side flaps for ventilation in 1922, in a village of about fifty people, and German brass bands rotated through it from the other halls in the county. The settlement had been founded in 1877 as Martinsburg by Fritz Wilke, George Maenius and John Petri, who left Fredericksburg looking for pasture. Its post office ran from 1877 to 1886, after which the mail was routed through Hye.
History·Harris County
The Allen Brothers' Ad
Houston began as advertising copy. In August 1836, four months after the battle of San Jacinto, two brothers from New York, Augustus and John Kirby Allen, bought three quarters of an old Mexican land grant on Buffalo Bayou in two deeds two days apart, some six thousand six hundred acres for around nine thousand dollars, and by the end of the month were advertising a town that did not exist.
History·Bastrop County
The Alum Creek Fort
Where Alum Creek runs into the Colorado, families from Lincoln County, Missouri put up a log fort in the late 1820s and built their cabins around it. They had come in under Stephen F. Austin's second colony contract, and the families named on the state marker are the Winslow Turners, the Stephen Cottles and the Ahijah Highsmiths. Highsmith registered in the colony in April 1827, declaring himself thirty four years old with six children, and was issued title to his league on 5 April 1831.
Military·Presidio County
The Big Bend District
The army came to Marfa on 29 January 1911, when two troops of the Third Cavalry made a camp they called Camp Albert. It became Camp Marfa, and on the first day of 1930 Fort D. A. Russell. Through the Mexican Revolution the post was headquarters of the army's Big Bend District, which strung some forty small outposts along three hundred miles of the Rio Grande.
History·Val Verde County
The Border Blaster
John Romulus Brinkley made a fortune implanting goat glands in men who wanted their youth back. The operation cured nothing and killed people: by 1930 he had signed death certificates for dozens of patients, many of whom had arrived healthy, and he faced a run of wrongful death suits. That year Kansas revoked his medical licence and the federal radio commission refused to renew his station, so he moved to Del Rio and put a transmitter where American law could not reach it.
History·Presidio County
The Burial of Mr. Spanish
In 1954 Evelyn Davis, a seventh grade teacher at Marfa's Blackwell School, had her pupils write on slips of paper that they would not speak Spanish. The slips went into a cardboard coffin, and the school gathered at the flagpole to bury it in the flower bed. The ceremony was not marking an old rule, it was imposing a new one, on a campus that had run a Spanish speaking branch of the Interscholastic League in the 1930s.
History·Washington County
The Burning Of Brenham
On the night of 7 September 1866, federal occupation troops set fire to part of the commercial heart of Brenham, and nobody was ever convicted of it. The quarrel behind the fire had been running for weeks in print. D. L. McGary, editor of the Brenham Banner, had been attacking the local Freedmen's Bureau in his columns, and federal authorities arrested him for it. After his release, three soldiers were shot during an altercation at a dance.
History·Austin County
The Burning of San Felipe
On 29 March 1836 the town that had been the capital of Anglo Texas was burned by its own garrison. Captain Moseley Baker had been left with a small company to hold the Brazos crossing against Santa Anna's advance, and he ordered San Felipe de Austin evacuated and put to the torch so the Mexican army could not use it. Baker said afterwards that Sam Houston had ordered the burning. Houston flatly denied it.
Industry & Science·Bastrop County
The Butler Brickworks
Michael Butler came out of Limerick to New York in 1866, learned the bricklayer's trade as a helper, and founded his own brick company in Austin in 1873. What he was really looking for was clay, and he found it here, at a siding the Texas and New Orleans Railroad had reached in 1871, five miles east of Elgin. The works grew onto a thousand acres and the settlement around it took the family name.
Industry & Science·Presidio County
The Candelilla Trade
Candelilla is a grey green, all but leafless desert spurge that grows in stands on both sides of the Rio Grande and carries a hard wax on its stems to hold its moisture in. The stalks go into a vat of boiling river water, sulphuric acid is poured over them, and the wax comes up as a brown foam that is skimmed off and left to set in blocks. In that raw state it is called cerote.
History·Burnet County
The Capitol Granite
The Texas Capitol is pink because the limestone near Austin had iron in it and stained when it weathered, and because the Capitol Board and Governor John Ireland held out for Texas stone against a proposal to substitute limestone from Bedford, Indiana. The owners of Granite Mountain, George W. Lacy, Nimrod L. Norton and William H. Westfall, then donated outright every cubic foot the building needed.
Architecture·Fayette County
The Chapel From La Grange
The chapel standing on this hill was built in La Grange in 1883, sixteen miles away, and served as the sanctuary of the Travis Street Methodist church there. It held a congregation for over a century, was sold in 1994, and was then taken apart and carried here piece by piece between January and April of that year.
Industry & Science·Dallas County
The Continental Gin
Robert S. Munger changed how America ginned cotton, and he built the factory for it in Dallas. Before him a gin was a row of separate machines that men fed by hand, hauling seed cotton in baskets from one to the next. Munger's system, worked out in the mid 1880s and patented in 1892, sucked the cotton out of the wagon through a pipe into an air stream and carried it through the whole plant on air and conveyors in one continuous process, from separator to distributor to feeders to a single flue…
History·Presidio County
The County Seat Election
Presidio County was organised in 1871 and ran from the Rio Grande to the Davis Mountains, with its seat at Fort Davis. The courthouse there later burned, and the record of the election that had chosen it burned with it. So when the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway laid track across the north of the county in the early 1880s and a water stop called Marfa grew up beside the line, the railroad town had its opening: it disputed a result nobody could produce.
Architecture·Lee County
The Courthouse That Sagged
James Riely Gordon designed this courthouse in 1897 and it was finished in 1899, one of the last of the Texas courthouses that made his name. It is Romanesque Revival, banded in Texas Cordova creme limestone against deep red brick, a bolder use of colour than his Comal County courthouse of the year before, which is the same design executed entirely in pale stone.
History·Blanco County
The Courthouse War
Blanco held its county seat by seven votes. The county was created in February 1858 with a requirement that its seat sit within five miles of the centre, and by 1862 the legislature had carved off Kendall County and compensated Blanco County with pieces of Hays and Burnet, which left the town of Blanco nowhere near the middle of anything. The northern end of the county wanted the courthouse moved. A December 1876 effort to call an election failed outright.
History·Harris County
The Crooked E
The glass tower at 1400 Smith Street was built as the headquarters of Enron, the Houston pipeline company that remade itself into an energy trader and was celebrated in the business press as the future of everything. That future ended in December 2001, when Enron collapsed into what was then the largest bankruptcy in American history.
Nature·Val Verde County
The Drowned Canyons
Amistad Dam, finished in 1969 by the United States and Mexico together, holds back the Rio Grande a dozen miles above Del Rio. The water it raised backed up the Rio Grande, the Pecos and the Devils rivers until the canyon floors of the Lower Pecos were under a reservoir. Archaeologists had been racing it for eleven years. The first survey went out in 1958 under the National Park Service and the Smithsonian, and two men recorded 188 sites on the Texas side in about ten weeks.
History·Burnet County
The Drowned Falls
The town is named for a waterfall that has been under a lake since 1951, and the rock was never marble. The falls were a shelf of limestone running across the Colorado, hard and cherty enough that early settlers took it for marble and the name stuck. It stuck early: the great falls, or the marble falls, of the Colorado were being written about as early as 1817, roughly seventy years before anybody platted a town to go with them.
History·Gillespie County
The Easter Fires
The state of Texas put a story on a roadside marker in 1968 that cannot be true, and what undoes it is a calendar. The marker says that in March 1847, when Comanches and whites signed a major peace treaty, the Indians lighted huge signal fires on the hills, and that a mother calmed her children by telling them the smoke came from pots in which the Easter Bunny was dyeing eggs with flowers. The council on the San Saba broke up on 2 March.
Quirky·Fayette County
The Fair That Ate Warrenton
Warrenton is the clearest measure of what an antiques fair did to a stretch of Texas farm road. The village had dwindled to about fifty residents by 1985, the ordinary fate of a crossroads whose cotton and corn and dairying had gone, and and it had twelve antique stores in it. Fifty people, twelve shops. Warrenton never had a railroad to lose, which is part of why it stayed small; what it had was cheap open ground beside a highway, and farmers willing to rent it out.
History·Travis County
The Farms Under the Runway
The airfield that became Bergstrom Air Force Base, and later Austin's airport, was built on three thousand acres of the Santiago del Valle grant that the City of Austin bought and leased to the federal government for one dollar a year. Austin voters approved the bond overwhelmingly, and the Chamber of Commerce notified the Army of the result on 15 March 1942. Construction began that May, and the contractor had sixteen hundred civilian workers on the ground within weeks.
History·Fayette County
The Fever Year, 1867
The first confirmed death was a man named Sayers, on 27 August 1867. By November yellow fever had killed two hundred and three people in La Grange, out of a town of roughly a thousand. The dead were counted in the categories of the period: a hundred and twelve foreign born, seventy Americans, twenty one Black. Coffins ran out and the bodies went into rough wooden boxes, then stood in piles inside the cemetery fence waiting for ground, and were finally buried six and seven to a grave.
History·Harris County
The Fifty Fifty Plan
Houston is a great port fifty miles from the sea, and the fact was bought with a piece of financial engineering as important to the city as any oil well. Dredging Buffalo Bayou had been the local ambition since the 1860s, and after the 1900 hurricane destroyed Galveston the case for an inland harbour became urgent, but Congress would not pay for the whole dig. In 1909 Mayor Horace Baldwin Rice took a delegation to Washington with what became known as the Houston Plan: the county would pay half.
History·Washington County
The Flewellen Poll
The election held in Washington County on 2 November 1886 is known to historians as the Texas Election Outrage. The Handbook of Texas puts it plainly: ballot boxes from Black precincts were stolen, three Black leaders were lynched, and white Republican leaders were run out of the county. The man killed at the poll was Dewees Bolton, a white farmer of twenty seven, shot at Flewellen's store in the northeast of the county.
History·Bastrop County
The Flood That Made Elgin
Elgin exists because the Colorado River flooded in 1869. The Houston and Texas Central had intended to run southwest from McDade, strike the river somewhere between Bastrop and Webberville, and follow the water into Austin. The flood made that route look foolish, the surveyors moved the line north onto higher ground, and a flag stop called Glasscock opened on the new alignment in 1871, named for George W. Glasscock.
Architecture·Brewster County
The Gage Hotel
Alfred S. Gage was a Vermonter who came to Texas in 1878 to help his brother survey and sell land, and who ended up with one of the great ranching operations of the Trans Pecos. He was living in San Antonio by 1900 and became a banker there, president of the Lockwood National Bank and of the city water company, and he built the ranch from that end rather than the other way round: in 1913 he bought out his fellow stockholders and merged holdings into the A. S.
Industry & Science·Lee County
The Giddings Oil Boom
In 1960 a well called the No. 1 City of Giddings came in flowing just under a hundred barrels a day, and the operator killed it with drilling mud to install production equipment. It never recovered, and it taught the trade a proverb: never kill an Austin Chalk well, because it will not come back. The oil was pale, almost honey coloured, and easier to refine than the black crude nearby. In 1972 C. W.
Industry & Science·Travis County
The Gravel Pit Tesla Bought
Before it was a car factory, the land on the Colorado River east of Del Valle was a hole in the ground. A sand and gravel quarry operated there under TXI Operations, which Martin Marietta acquired when it bought Texas Industries in 2014. On a July 2020 earnings call the company's chief financial officer described what it had just agreed to sell as a depleted sand and gravel location in Austin, Texas, for nearly one hundred million dollars.
History·Dallas County
The Hall of Negro Life
The Texas Centennial Exposition of 1936 was the first world's fair in the United States to give Black American life a building of its own. Texas and Dallas both declined to pay for it; a hundred thousand dollars of federal money was secured by two leaders of Black Dallas, A. Maceo Smith and Maynard H. Jackson, and construction began on 9 March 1936 to plans from George L. Dahl's office. Cross Construction finished it on 12 June and it was dedicated on 19 June, Juneteenth. Admission was free.
History·Washington County
The Houston-Lea Tomb
Margaret Moffette Lea married Sam Houston in 1840, when she was twenty one and he was forty seven, bore him eight children, and is generally credited with persuading him both to stop drinking and to be baptised. She outlived him by four years. He died at Huntsville in 1863 and was buried there. She died at Independence on 3 December 1867, aged forty eight, of yellow fever, in the epidemic that killed roughly four thousand Texans that year, and she was not buried beside him.
History·Val Verde County
The Jersey Lilly
Roy Bean kept a saloon in Langtry and held court in it, and called himself the Law West of the Pecos, which for a while he genuinely was. The appointment was real: justice of the peace from August 1882, voted out twice, back both times, and retired of his own accord in 1902. He named the bar after the actress Lillie Langtry, whose nickname was the Jersey Lily, one L, after the island she was born on and a portrait of her that stopped traffic at the Royal Academy.
History·Blanco County
The Johnson Settlement
The president's grandfather ran the largest trail driving outfit in Blanco and six neighbouring counties from a 960 acre homestead on the Pedernales, and he lost it. Between 1867 and 1871 Sam Ealy Johnson Senior and his brother Tom sent several herds of two and a half to three thousand longhorns a season up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene, Kansas, working pens at Williamson's Creek and Deer Creek. In 1870 they came back with a hundred thousand dollars in gold coins.
Transport·Val Verde County
The Loop Line
When the railroad first reached the Pecos in 1882 it did not cross where it crosses now. There was no way to carry a track straight over a canyon this deep with the money and the methods available, so the engineers took the trains down into it. The route was called the Loop Line, and it swung south towards the Rio Grande on steep grades, through deep cuts, along ledges where the danger of rockfall was constant, and through two tunnels, the first two bored in Texas, to reach a low bridge near…
History·Washington County
The Lost Plat Map
The only known plat map of Washington-on-the-Brazos was destroyed in the Great Storm of 1900, which meant that for more than a century nobody knew with any precision where the vanished town's buildings had stood. The ground was preserved as a park, carrying a replica of Independence Hall and very little else identified on it.
Industry & Science·Terrell County
The Mohair Country
Almost nothing grows on this country that a person can eat, and for most of the twentieth century that fact made Terrell County a place for sheep and Angora goats. The Angora is the animal that made the Edwards Plateau and the Trans Pecos productive: it converts brush and thin browse into a fibre that is lustrous, takes dye brilliantly, and is worth many times the weight of wool.
History·Bastrop County
The Notch Cutters
On Christmas Eve of 1883, forty or fifty armed men walked into the Rock Front Saloon at McDade, took three men out of it, and hanged all three from a single tree somewhere in the brush. The dead were said to belong to a gang of cattle and horse thieves the country knew as the notch cutters, and no source explains how the gang got that name.
History·Fayette County
The Octagon That Named It
In the mid 1840s a settler named Alwin Soergel built a white house here with an octagonal tower on it, and in a country of plain gabled roofs that tower was landmark enough to name the place. By 1847 the United States post office was listing it as Round Top. The joke is that the tower had eight sides rather than a round one, which nobody seems to have minded.
Industry & Science·Harris County
The Petrochemical Corridor
For twenty five miles east of Houston's Turning Basin, past Pasadena and Deer Park, across from Channelview and on to Baytown and Galveston Bay, runs the largest petrochemical complex in the United States and the second largest in the world. The plants came for the geometry: deep water on one side, cheap flat land on the other, the Gulf Coast oil fields behind, and a dredged channel that let crude arrive and products leave by tanker.
History·Presidio County
The Presidio Mine
In September 1880 John W. Spencer, a rancher and freighter supplying Fort Davis, picked up a surface rock that proved to carry silver. He showed it to Colonel William R. Shafter of the First Infantry, who had it assayed. By June 1882 the partners had leased ground to San Francisco mining speculators, and in late summer 1883 the Presidio Mining Company was organised. The town that grew at the mine took the colonel's name.
Transport·Presidio County
The Presidio Rail Bridge
The Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railway was meant to run from Kansas City to the Pacific at Topolobampo, and it never got there. The Santa Fe bought what was left of it in 1928, and in 1930 it closed the last gap in Texas: running rights over another company's track from Alpine to Paisano Pass, then seventy two miles of new line of its own down to Presidio, and a bridge over the Rio Grande to meet the Mexican railway at Ojinaga.
History·Washington County
The Railroad Bonus
Washington-on-the-Brazos was the county's first town, grown up at a ferry crossing on the Brazos in the 1820s and a real commercial centre by the mid 1830s. It is known as the place where the Texas Declaration of Independence was adopted on 2 March 1836 and signed the day after. Less often told is how it died, and it died of a decision its own citizens made. In 1858 the Houston and Texas Central Railway asked the town for a bonus of eleven thousand dollars to bring the line through.
History·Presidio County
The Refugee March to Marfa
Ojinaga, across the river from Presidio, was the last town in northern Mexico still held by federal troops. Pancho Villa opened his final assault on the evening of 10 January 1914, the federals broke overnight, and the town was his on the eleventh. What crossed the Rio Grande over the following days was less an army in retreat than a town in flight: several thousand people, federal soldiers with their wives and children, more than a thousand horses and mules, and some seven hundred wounded who…
Nature·Dallas County
The River Dallas Moved
The Trinity River does not run where it used to. Until the late 1920s it wandered through the bottomland west of downtown Dallas in a set of loops that flooded the town again and again. Fifteen inches of rain fell on 25 May 1908; the river crested the next day at fifty two and a half feet, a record that still stands, spread a mile and a half wide, took out every bridge and left Oak Cliff reachable only by boat. Five people died and four thousand were made homeless.
Sports·Val Verde County
The Sandbar Prizefight
On 21 February 1896 the heavyweight fight between Bob Fitzsimmons and Peter Maher was held on a sandbar in the Rio Grande, at the mouth of Eagle Nest Canyon below Langtry. It had taken four years to find anywhere to hold it. Texas had made prizefighting a felony the previous October and Governor Culberson sent most of the Ranger force, some twenty six men under the adjutant general, to see that it did not happen.
History·Dallas County
The Sanger Wholesale House
The Sanger brothers are remembered in Dallas for a department store, but the business that mattered most to the city was the one behind it. Seven brothers came from Obernbreit in Bavaria over some fifteen years, Isaac first to McKinney in 1857, and they opened a store in each new railhead town as the Houston and Texas Central built north, Millican, Bryan, Calvert, Corsicana.
History·Val Verde County
The Seminole Scouts
Seminole Canyon is not named for anyone who lived in it. It takes its name from the Black Seminole Indian Scouts, descendants of people who had escaped slavery in the American South and found refuge among the Seminole in Florida, then went by way of Indian Territory to Mexico. The United States Army recruited them in 1870, and from 1872 they were based at Fort Clark, seventy miles east at Brackettville.
History·Val Verde County
The Silver Spike
On 12 January 1883, about three miles west of the Pecos River, a rail gang working east from El Paso met a rail gang working west from San Antonio, and Thomas Wentworth Peirce, president of the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio, drove a silver spike to join them. It was a smaller occasion than the golden spike in Utah fourteen years earlier and it is far less remembered, but it mattered more to this corner of Texas, because it is the reason the towns along the line exist at all.