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- History·Colorado County
Alleyton and the Cotton Road
The railroad reached Alleyton in 1860 and then stopped, which left this small place as the westernmost railhead in Texas at exactly the wrong moment in history. When the Union blockaded the Texas coas…
- History·Austin County
Austin's Colony Capital
For twelve years this bend of the Brazos was the effective capital of Anglo Texas. Stephen F. Austin founded the settlement in 1823 to administer the colony he had contracted with the Mexican governme…
- Transport·Bastrop County
Bastrop's Old Iron Bridge
Bastrop voted to tax itself for this bridge. In 1921, with motor cars replacing wagons faster than the county could keep up, residents approved a tax increase and the county issued road bonds, and the…
- History·Colorado County
Beason's Crossing
Benjamin Beason ran a ferry across the Colorado here, and for one week in March 1836 his crossing was the pivot of the Texas Revolution. Sam Houston brought his army to the east bank on the nineteenth…
- Military·Travis County
Bergstrom's Bomber Base
Austin's airport is a converted bomber base, and the runways beneath the airliners were laid out in 1942. It opened that September as Del Valle Army Air Base, on three thousand acres leased from the c…
- Quirky·Fort Bend County
Buc-ee's Record Car Wash
The Buc-ee's at Katy is the one that holds the record. Its car wash runs 255 feet of conveyor, the longest in the world, so long that a car takes several minutes to travel it from end to end and drive…
- Entertainment & Sports·Montgomery County
Crighton Theatre
George Strake struck oil outside Conroe in December 1931, and this theatre is what one man did with his share of it. Harry Moore Crighton was the town pharmacist and its mayor. He sold the drugstore i…
- Nature·Bastrop County
Four Landscapes Meet
This 1,140 acre park on the highway east of Austin sits directly on a seam in the map. Four distinct Texas ecosystems meet inside its boundaries: the Post Oak Savannah, the Blackland Prairie, an outly…
- History·Walker County
Gibbs-Powell House
Thomas Gibbs commissioned this house in 1862 and a builder named W. M. Barrett put it up, in Greek Revival because that is what a prosperous Southern merchant built in Texas at the time. Gibbs was a s…
- Museums & Art·Travis County
Hi, How Are You Mural
Daniel Johnston painted this wide-eyed frog, known as Jeremiah the Innocent, on the side of a record store at 21st and Guadalupe in 1993. The store is long gone and the building has changed hands more…
- Entertainment & Sports·Bastrop County
Hope Floats House
At the corner of East Eighth and Olive in Smithville stands the house Sandra Bullock's character came home to in Hope Floats, the 1998 film that put this town on the map and eventually onto the sign a…
- Industry & Science·Fayette County
Hruska's Store and Bakery
Before kolaches became a chain product they were a Saturday morning thing at a filling station in Ellinger. The family opened a store here in 1912. In 1952 Frankie Hruska and his wife Bessie built a s…
- Industry & Science·Fort Bend County
Igloo, Made in Katy
The low industrial buildings north of the interstate west of Katy are the headquarters of Igloo, which turns out something like sixteen million coolers a year and has been doing a version of this job …
- History·Fort Bend County
Katy's Rice Dryers
Katy is named after a railroad, though not in the way towns usually are. The Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad was known everywhere along its line by its initials, the K-T, which crews and passenger…
- History·Montgomery County
Lone Star Flag Park
This park beside the interstate in Conroe was built in 2011 to press a claim that historians have never accepted. Montgomery County says the Lone Star flag was designed by Dr Charles Bellinger Tate St…
- Quirky·Bastrop County
Ms. Pearl the Giant Squirrel
A fourteen foot squirrel stands beside Highway 71 at Cedar Creek holding a pecan, and she is there for an entirely straightforward commercial reason. The Berdoll family grew pecans and made pies, and …
- History·Walker County
Old Sparky
The oak chair in the replica execution chamber here killed 361 people between 1924 and 1964. Texas had centralised executions the year before it was built, taking them away from the counties and movin…
- History·Bastrop County
Railroad Town, Film Town
Smithville is the size it is because of a repair shop. The Taylor, Bastrop and Houston Railroad came through in 1886, the Missouri, Kansas and Texas took the line over in 1891, and in 1894 the Katy bu…
- Museums & Art·Walker County
Sam Houston Memorial Museum
Fifteen acres in the middle of Huntsville hold the two houses Sam Houston lived and died in, which is a different proposition from the concrete giant five miles down the interstate. The land was part …
- History·Walker County
Sam Houston Statue
Sixty seven feet of Sam Houston stands in the pines beside Interstate 45, on a granite pedestal ten feet high, and northbound drivers see him a long way off. The sculptor was David Adickes, born in Hu…
- Quirky·Bastrop County
Smitty the Gingerbread Man
On the second of December, 2006, at the sixteenth annual Festival of Lights, Smithville baked a gingerbread man weighing 1,308 pounds and eight ounces and measuring twenty feet from head to toe. It to…
- Entertainment & Sports·Bastrop County
The Bastrop Opera House
Two merchants, P. Otto Elzner and S. D. Green, put this up in 1889 for about fifteen thousand dollars, building it behind Elzner's store on the site of an old stable and copying the design of the oper…
- Entertainment & Sports·Fayette County
The Bugle Boy
The building is a World War Two barracks from Camp Swift, near Bastrop, which was the largest army training camp in Texas and held ninety thousand troops at its peak, along with roughly 4,800 German p…
- Architecture·Colorado County
The Cattle Baron's Opera House
Robert E. Stafford ran cattle and money in Colorado County, and in 1886 he spent fifty thousand dollars on a building on Spring Street, then another ten thousand on the curtain, the wings and the stag…
- Architecture·Bastrop County
The CCC Cabins
Fifteen stone cabins here were built by hand in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps, and they are still rented out by the night, which means anyone can sleep in one for the price of a motel r…
- History·Colorado County
The Court Oak
There is a tree stump in the middle of Travis Street beside the Colorado County courthouse, and the roadway was built around it on purpose. In April 1837 the first term of the district court under the…
- Museums & Art·Fayette County
The Czech Heritage Center
Fayette County was one of the principal destinations of Czech and Moravian migration into Texas, and this centre on the edge of La Grange exists to hold what that migration left behind. The main build…
- Industry & Science·Fayette County
The Jersey Barnyard
Four generations of the Frerichs family have milked Jersey cows on this land outside La Grange, and the dairy has been running for something over a century. Around a hundred and thirty cows are milked…
- Nature·Bastrop County
The Lost Pines
The pines along this stretch of road have no business being here. The Lost Pines are a stand of loblolly pine covering more than 75,000 acres across parts of five counties, cut off by about a hundred …
- History·Fayette County
The Monument Hill Brewery
On a sandstone bluff two hundred feet above the Colorado River there is a tomb, and a short walk down the ravine behind it, the stone shell of one of the first commercial breweries in Texas. The tomb …
- Museums & Art·Colorado County
The Santa Claus Museum
A woman named Mary Elizabeth Youens Hopkins was given a Santa Claus figure in 1913, when she was six months old. Her parents noticed that she would play with nothing else and kept giving her Santas, a…
- History·Austin County
The Sealy Mattress
The town came first and the mattress took its name from the town, which is the reverse of what most people assume. Daniel Haynes arrived in this new railroad settlement in 1881 as a builder of cotton …
- Museums & Art·Fayette County
The Texas Quilt Museum
Karey Patterson Bresenhan and Nancy O'Bryant Puentes had been bringing thousands of quilts to the International Quilt Festival in Houston every year since 1974, and the same frustration recurred annua…
- History·Colorado County
The Tower That Would Not Fall
Columbus built this brick tower in 1883 to carry the tank that supplied water for fighting downtown fires. It took four hundred thousand bricks and the walls are three feet thick at the base, which wa…
- Transport·Harris County
The Widest Freeway
Near the Sam Houston Tollway the Katy Freeway reaches twenty six lanes across: twelve main lanes, eight lanes of frontage road, and six managed lanes down the middle. It is routinely called the widest…
- Industry & Science·Fayette County
Weikel's and the Bon Ton
The bakery on the west side of La Grange is the fourth act of a family business that began in 1929 with a cafe. Alvin Weikel and his brother, known to everyone as Pop, opened the Bon Ton Cafe in downt…