Local Stories in Texas
107 places·3 counties·Page 3 of 3
Featured places available on the Whistlestop audio tour guide app
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Nature·Gillespie County
The Stonewall Peach
Gillespie County grows peaches because it is cold enough, which is not a sentence anyone expects about Texas. A peach tree needs a tally of winter hours below 45 degrees before it will set fruit properly, and Texas A and M AgriLife puts the requirement for Hill Country orchards at roughly 830 of them. Varieties grown in South Texas get by on as few as 200.
History·Blanco County
The Swearing-In at Hye
On 3 November 1965 a Postmaster General of the United States was sworn into the cabinet on the porch of a country store, and the president who swore him in used the occasion to make a point about his own childhood. Lawrence F. O'Brien took the oath at the Hye post office, with the outgoing Postmaster General John Gronouski standing by, newly appointed ambassador to Poland, and Levi Deike, the postmaster, who had been appointed in 1934.
History·Dallas County
The Trade Mart Luncheon
The steak was already being served when the news reached the room. Dallas's business establishment had sold out the hall at the Trade Mart on Stemmons Freeway for 22 November 1963, two thousand six hundred invitations out, and the motorcade through downtown was to arrive at half past twelve. Guests had gathered from eleven and were told from the podium to start eating; the Catholics among them had a dispensation for meat on a Friday.
Museums & Art·Val Verde County
The White Shaman Mural
On a shelter wall above the Pecos River, about a mile up from where it joins the Rio Grande, there is a painting twenty six feet long and thirteen feet high holding more than a hundred figures. It is roughly two thousand years old. For most of the last century Lower Pecos rock art was read as the record of individual visions, and the pale headless figure near the centre of the panel was taken for a shaman, which is where the name came from.
Nature·Gillespie County
The Willow City Loop
Thirteen miles of county road run through private ranchland, and the arrangement is older and more deliberate than the traffic suggests. That part of Gillespie County had no public roads at all until 1934, when the Commissioners Court established a third class road forty feet wide from the Holmes-Moss Ranch across to the Llano and Fredericksburg road. Those forty feet are the whole of what is public.
History·Val Verde County
Vinegarroon
Where the Pecos River runs into the Rio Grande there was a town for a year or two. In 1882 the railroad was boring its second tunnel through the canyon wall on the west side of the Pecos, and the camp that housed the crews doing it stood on this ground: tents, several hundred workers at least and by some accounts thousands, most of them Chinese labourers brought in for the job.
History·Fayette County
Zadock Woods
Zadock Woods was sixty nine years old the day he died in the Dawson Massacre, the oldest man killed there, and by the account the Texas State Historical Association follows it was his birthday. He had been born in Massachusetts in 1773, fought in the War of 1812 at another Woods' Fort in Missouri under Zachary Taylor, rode with Andrew Jackson at New Orleans, and come to Austin's colony in 1824 as one of the Old Three Hundred.