Roadside Attractions in Texas
81 places·1 county·Page 1 of 2
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History·Gillespie County
Air Force One-Half
The small four engine jet parked in an open hangar on the LBJ Ranch is one of the JetStars that carried Lyndon Johnson between Washington and the Pedernales, and he gave it its nickname. Any aircraft carrying the president is Air Force One, so Johnson called the Lockheed JetStar, a plane sixty feet long with room for thirteen passengers, Air Force One-Half.
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 coast during the Civil War, cotton could no longer leave through Galveston, and cotton was very nearly the only thing the Confederacy had to sell. So the crop came here by rail from across the interior, was transferred onto wagons at the end of the line, and went overland instead.
Music History·Travis County
Antone's Nightclub
Clifford Antone opened a blues club on Sixth Street on the fifteenth of July, 1975, and Clifton Chenier played the first night. It was an eccentric thing to do. Disco was ascendant, the Chicago and Delta players who had made the music were ageing and largely unbooked, and Antone spent his own money flying them to Texas to work. That is the reason the club matters.
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 government to bring in, beginning with the 297 families later remembered as the Old Three Hundred. From 1824 to 1836 San Felipe de Austin was the political, commercial and social centre of the American colonies in Texas.
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 result opened in January 1924 at a cost of 167,500 dollars. It is 1,285 feet of concrete and steel across the Colorado, carried on three steel through truss spans of 192 feet each, built in the Parker truss style that was standard for Texas river crossings from the 1920s through the 1940s.
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 and made camp. He was waiting for James Fannin and more than four hundred men to march up and join him from Goliad, which would have roughly doubled his strength and changed what he could afford to do.
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 city, and in March 1943 it was renamed for Captain John August Earl Bergstrom.
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 drivers routinely film the trip. The chain itself began a long way from here and on a much smaller scale. Arch Aplin the Third, known since childhood as Beaver, opened the first Buc-ee's on July 28, 1982, in Lake Jackson, south of Houston, with his business partner Don Wasek.
Quirky·Travis County
Casa Neverlandia
This is a one storey house from 1906 that its owner has spent decades building upward and covering in mosaic. The artist James Edward Talbot turned it into a three storey structure faced in stone and broken tile, and he has set into that facade stones from an Austin building he once worked on, from houses he lived in in Turkey and Paraguay, and from his mother's birthplace, so the outside wall is partly an autobiography. Talbot grew up in a military family that moved constantly.
Sports·Burnet County
Charley Taylor Arena
The rodeo arena on US 281 on the south side of Marble Falls is the home of the Marble Falls Rodeo, held on the third weekend of July, and it carries the name of Charley Taylor, who helped found the rodeo association in 1957. Charley Taylor was its first president, with Jack Rogers and Bobby Burnam, and by the association's own account more than two thousand people came to the first show. The arena then stood on railroad land near Avenue N in town.
Film History·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 in 1934, went into the oil business, and hired the Houston architect Blum E. Hester to build him a movie palace on Main Street modelled on the Majestic in Houston.
History·Travis County
Donn's Depot
This bar is an actual railroad station. It stood at McNeil, north of Austin, for ninety years, and when the building was condemned an Austin engineering consultant named Bob Ogden bought it for two hundred dollars, then paid two thousand more in 1970 to have it hauled fifteen miles down to the corner of West Fifth Street and West Lynn. At the time that corner was a thinly settled edge of town. A year after opening he added two railroad cars to the building.
History·Travis County
Doug Sahm Hill
The highest point in Butler Park is a grassy mound with a paved spiral path to the top, and from it you get the postcard view of downtown Austin across Lady Bird Lake. In 2008 the city named it for Doug Sahm, and a permanent marker was later installed at the summit by his sons Shawn and Shandon. Sahm is the most under celebrated major figure in Texas music.
Education·Blanco County
Exotic Resort Zoo
The Exotic Resort Zoo is a family run animal park of one hundred and thirty seven acres off US 281, a few miles north of Johnson City, where zebras, camels, kangaroos, kudu, oryx and bison share the Hill Country pastures. It opened in 1995. Most visitors see it from a trailer pulled by a tractor, on a guided tour of forty five minutes to an hour that works through seven fenced pastures, and riders can buy feed to hand to the animals that crowd the trailer.
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 outlying finger of the East Texas piney woods, and the riparian corridor of the Colorado River itself. Walking the seventeen and a half miles of trail here means crossing from one into another within a few hundred yards, which almost nowhere else in the state allows you to do on foot in an afternoon.
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 storekeeper and a landowner, and he was close enough to Sam Houston, who lived about six blocks away, that Houston named him first executor of his will. Houston died the year after the house was finished.
Quirky·Travis County
Greetings From Austin
The most photographed wall in South Austin is a postcard. Todd Sanders and Rory Skagen painted it in 1998 on the side of Roadhouse Relics, Sanders's neon sign shop at South First and Annie, copying the format of the large letter postcards American towns sold in the 1940s: the city name in block capitals with a scene painted inside each letter. The scenes are local, including the University of Texas tower, the Capitol, the Congress Avenue bridge and Barton Springs.
Museums & Art·Travis County
Hi, How Are You Mural
The "Hi, How Are You" mural by singer-songwriter Daniel Johston, is one of the most recognizable and cherished pieces of public art in Texas. Painted in dark ink against a brick wall, the mural depicts a wide-eyed, stalk-eyed cartoon frog greeting passersby with an unassuming speech bubble asking: *"Hi, How Are You?
History·Travis County
Historic Scoot Inn
There has been a business on this corner of East Fourth and Navasota since 1871, when Sam and Nancy Wilson opened a grocery and mercantile to serve the traffic arriving on the newly built railroad. The current front dates from 1889. That makes the building one of the oldest continuously used commercial structures in Austin, and it advertises itself as the oldest bar in Central Texas, a claim that needs a small asterisk.
Music History·Travis County
Hole in the Wall
This bar opened on Guadalupe Street across from the University of Texas in 1974 and was never meant to be a music venue. Its owner Doug Cugini has said as much: musicians drank there, so he let some of them play, and the stage grew out of that rather than from any plan. It turned fifty in 2024, and something like ten thousand musicians have worked it. The first years were a folk room, with Townes Van Zandt, Blaze Foley and Nanci Griffith on the bill.
Film History·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 at its edge. It is the McCollum Chapman Trousdale House, built in 1908 in a Neoclassical style for J. H. McCollum, with a deep columned porch and the kind of proportions that read immediately as a family house with history in it.
Quirky·Gillespie County
Howard Huge
The fibreglass giant standing beside US 290 east of Fredericksburg is Howard Huge, a Muffler Man who spent more than forty years in Maine before coming to Texas. He is one of the roughly twenty foot fibreglass giants that International Fiberglass of Venice, California, made in the 1960s and 1970s as roadside advertising for car businesses and restaurants: a Bow-tie model, with a bow tie at his collar, and an unusual pillbox cap.
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 service station on Highway 71 and moved the store into it, and from 1962 a local woman baked kolaches there on Saturday mornings, which is how a place selling fuel turned into a place people planned around.
Quirky·Travis County
I Love You So Much
Eight words in red spray paint on a green wall, and they were not meant to be public art. In 2010 the musician Amy Cook wrote them on the side of Jo's Coffee on South Congress in the middle of an argument with her partner Liz Lambert, who was the majority owner of Jo's. It was a private apology written in the most public place available, in daylight, on her girlfriend's own building.
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 since 1947. It began as a small metalworking shop in Houston, and its first product was not a cooler at all.
Quirky·Ector County
Jack Ben Rabbit
Jack Ben Rabbit is a fiberglass jackrabbit eight feet tall on the lawn at West 8th Street and North Sam Houston Avenue in Odessa, Texas. The chamber of commerce put him up in 1962, had him made by a California plastics firm that no source names, and paid a reported 2,300 dollars. The name is a joke on John Ben Shepperd, the chamber president and a former attorney general of Texas, whose idea he was.
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 passengers alike said aloud as Katy. When James Oliver Thomas platted a town here in 1895 and applied for a post office the following January, the name that stuck was the railroad's nickname rather than a founder's surname or a place left behind in the old country.
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 Stewart, a physician who lived in the town of Montgomery, about fourteen miles west of here. On 30 May 1997 the Texas House of Representatives adopted a resolution commemorating Montgomery County as the birthplace of the Lone Star flag, which is how a contested attribution acquires an official ring.
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 needed drivers on a fast highway to actually stop rather than register the sign and keep going. The proposal, as the family tells it, was that people could not drive past a giant squirrel. They were right. Ms.
Quirky·Travis County
Museum of the Weird
Behind a souvenir shop on Sixth Street is a deliberate revival of a form of entertainment that died out a century ago. Steve and Veronica Busti opened Lucky Lizard Curios and Gifts here in 2005, and Steve began filling an unused room at the back with the oddities he collected, on the model of the dime museums P. T. Barnum ran in the middle 1800s: a paid room of curiosities, shown without apology and without much explanation.
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 moving them to the Huntsville Unit about two and a half miles from this spot; the last public county hanging had already happened, in Brazoria County in August 1923.
Quirky·Pecos County
Paisano Pete
Paisano Pete is a roadrunner 11 feet tall and 22 feet long standing at the corner of North Main Street and East Dickinson Boulevard in Fort Stockton, Texas, where the business route of Interstate 10 runs through town carrying US 285 and US 385 with it. He went up at the end of the 1970s, in 1979 or 1980 depending on the account, and the town named him by public competition, paying out 50 dollars for the winning entry. Paisano is the Spanish name for the bird in this part of Texas.
Entertainment·Travis County
Peter Pan Mini-Golf
Three brothers, Glenn, Jack and Clifford Dismukes, opened a miniature golf course on this sloping corner where Barton Springs Road meets South Lamar in 1948, and it has been in the same family ever since. It was called Varsity Links at first. The name that stuck came from the giant Peter Pan that Glenn built at the entrance, one of a menagerie of hand made concrete figures that also includes a whale, a clown and a dinosaur the family calls Trex.
History·Travis County
Philosophers' Rock
Three men in bronze are arguing at the entrance to Barton Springs Pool, and they are life size, unheroic and mostly undressed. Glenna Goodacre's sculpture was installed under the pecan trees here on the twenty first of November, 1994, commissioned by the Austin nonprofit Capital Area Statues. It shows the folklorist J.
Entertainment·Travis County
Pinballz Arcade
Darren and Mikki Spohn opened this arcade on Research Boulevard in November 2010, at a point when American arcades had been closing for twenty years and they were told repeatedly that the business could not work. The stock came from Darren's own pinball collection, which had outgrown the house. It worked.
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 built a large locomotive repair shop here and made the town a division point, which meant crews changed here, engines were serviced here, and hundreds of skilled men needed housing here.
Education·Blanco County
Reptilandia
Reptilandia Reptile Lagoon is an indoor reptile zoo on US 281 just north of Johnson City, opened in December 2022 by a herpetologist who had already run a zoo of the same name in Costa Rica for more than two decades. Quetzal Dwyer grew up in New York, worked at a reptile zoo in the Canary Islands, and founded the original Reptilandia in Costa Rica before bringing the name to the Hill Country.
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 of Houston's own farm and the museum is run by Sam Houston State University. Woodland is the dogtrot he and Margaret finished in 1848, log built with a breezeway down the middle, and it stands where it was, as does the one room cabin he practised law from.
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 Huntsville in 1927, who later became known for the row of oversized presidential heads off the same highway in Houston.
Music History·Travis County
Sam's Town Point
A dance hall in deep South Austin that began as one woman's specific ambition. Penny Grossman left Chicago in 1979 wanting to run a dance hall, bought four rural acres out near Slaughter Lane and Manchaca Road, and opened Sam's Town Point in 1981. The name comes from the property itself: the Austin city limit once ran through it, so the parking lot was in the city and the bar was out in Travis County, and Sam was a business associate of hers. The room is unreconstructed.
Education·Blanco County
Science Mill
Johnson City's science museum is built inside a mill that has changed trades several times since 1880. James Polk Johnson, who had founded the town the year before, built it as a steam grist mill and cotton gin. It became a flour mill in 1901 and a feed mill in the 1930s, and after it closed in the 1980s it was a restaurant for some years before it stood empty.
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 took 750 pounds of flour, 49 gallons of molasses and 72 dozen eggs, and it was baked outdoors over a dump truck load of charcoal, because no oven in the county was remotely large enough.
Music History·Travis County
Stubb's Amphitheater
Christopher B. Stubblefield, known to everyone as Stubb, ran a barbecue joint in Lubbock from 1968 where Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock played Sunday night jam sessions in a room with a few tables and a jukebox. He was a better cook and a better host than businessman, went broke more than once, and moved to Austin in 1986, where he became a well known figure long before there was a restaurant with his name on it. He died in 1995.
History·Travis County
The Austin Motel
The twenty five foot neon sign in front of this motor court has been lit on South Congress since 1938, and it has outlasted every version of the street beneath it. Jennie Eck Stewart inherited land in the twelve hundred block from her parents in 1925; she and her husband Earnest built up the row of stores there, then added the motel and its sign in 1938, catching the first great wave of American automobile travel. The sign is the same one.
Entertainment·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 opera house at Taylor rather than paying an architect for a new one. It had large fireplaces in the east and west walls, which was the entire heating system, and it opened on the first of October, 1889, with a military ball and supper attended by more than sixty couples.
Quirky·Blanco County
The Blanco Bowling Club
The six lanes behind the cafe on Fourth Street in Blanco play nine-pin, a German game that survives commercially nowhere in the world except a cluster of Central Texas counties. The pins stand in a diamond rather than a triangle, the one in the middle is painted red, and teams of six bowl six frames instead of ten. Knocking down all nine pins scores nine. Knocking down the eight around the outside and leaving the red king pin standing scores twelve, which is the shot everyone is trying for.
Museums & Art·Travis County
The Blanton Museum
The University of Texas has one of the largest university art museums in the country, holding more than twenty two thousand works across nearly a hundred and ninety thousand square feet, and it is free to enter. It was founded in 1963. Its real strengths are three: modern and contemporary art of the Americas, with a Latin American collection that is among the most important anywhere; European painting and drawing; and prints and drawings in unusual depth.
Quirky·Hays County
The Buda Wiener Dog Races
Buda calls itself the Wiener Dog Capital of Texas, and it earned the title in a park beside the old main street. The Buda Lions Club ran the first races in 1997, after member Diane Krejci saw an identical event in Savannah, Georgia. About three dozen dachshunds entered that first year, under the banner The Amazing Wiener Dog.
Music History·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 prisoners of war, most of them taken from Rommel's Afrika Korps in North Africa and later from Normandy. When the camp was broken up after the war, the La Grange Sons of Hermann Lodge bought this barracks from the Army in 1948, hauled it here, and held their meetings in it until 2004.
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 stage machinery. He hired Nicholas J. Clayton, the Galveston architect responsible for the Bishop's Palace, to design it. The ground floor held Stafford's own bank and a dry goods store.