Roadside Attractions in Texas
81 places·1 county·Page 2 of 2
Featured places available on the Whistlestop audio tour guide app
This is a sample of locations. There are many more audio stories on the app.
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 room. Work began in 1933 under the regional director Herbert Maier, with the architect Arthur Fehr and the landscape architect Norfleet Giddings Bone, and the buildings are a textbook example of the rustic style the National Park Service developed for the programme: thick local stone, heavy timber,…
Nature·Travis County
The Congress Bridge Bats
When the state highway department rebuilt the Congress Avenue Bridge in 1980, its engineers set the deck on concrete box beams and left narrow gaps between them, roughly three quarters of an inch to an inch and a half wide and sixteen to eighteen inches deep. Nobody planned it, but that is almost exactly the roost a Mexican free-tailed bat wants.
Music History·Travis County
The Continental Club
This narrow room at 1315 South Congress opened in February 1955, in a building that had been a laundromat, and it has been in more or less continuous operation ever since. Its original owner Morin Scott ran it as a private supper club with a doorman and a dress code. It then became the first burlesque club in Austin, and after that a working man's bar that opened at seven in the morning, before it settled into what it is now.
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 Republic of Texas convened on this spot, under the branches of the live oak that stood here, because there was no building in town suitable for holding court in.
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 building, finished in 2009, has a glass entrance meant to read as the beacon of light that drew the settlers here, and inside it holds the Our New Home museum and the Bill and Betty Melnar Library, which between them cover the crossing, the land, the language and the slow business of becoming Texan…
Music History·Travis County
The Elephant Room
A basement jazz club under Congress Avenue, and the name is literal. During the downtown building boom of the late 1980s the skeleton of a mastodon was dug up on the site of a high rise going in at the south end of this block. Some of the bones were stored in the long narrow cellar next door, and when that cellar was let as a nightclub in January 1991 the new owners named it after what had been in it. It opened on the eighteenth of January, 1991, without live music.
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 twice a day, every day, which across the life of the farm adds up to more than fifty three thousand separate milkings and no days off.
History·Gillespie County
The LBJ Birthplace
The farmhouse where Lyndon Johnson was born on 27 August 1908 was torn down in the 1940s, and the one standing on its site on the Pedernales is a reconstruction that Johnson had built while he was president. His grandfather Sam Ealy Johnson Sr. had built the original in 1889. In 1964 the Austin architect J. Roy White rebuilt it from old photographs and from the memories of Johnson's relatives, reusing some of the stone from the original fireplace and some salvaged lumber.
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 miles of prairie and post oak from the main East Texas pine belt.
Nature·Travis County
The Mayfield Peacocks
Peacocks have had the run of this hillside garden above Lake Austin since 1935, when friends gave Mary Frances Gutsch and her husband a pair of them as a Christmas present. The birds bred, and the ones fanning their tails at visitors today are descended from that gift. They are not confined and not shy, and they roost in the live oaks and on the roof of the cottage. The cottage was built in the 1870s.
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 was built in 1848 to hold the remains of Texans killed in two disasters of the Republic era. The first was the Dawson Massacre of 1842, in which a volunteer company riding to relieve San Antonio was surrounded and cut to pieces.
History·Travis County
The Moonlight Towers
These are the last ones anywhere. In the 1880s and 1890s a number of American cities tried lighting themselves from above, with arc lamps hung on towers tall enough to wash a whole neighbourhood at once, and every one of those cities pulled its towers down by about 1910 in favour of streetlights at street level. Austin kept going, and seventeen of its towers survive, fifteen of them standing. The city bought thirty one of them second hand from Detroit in 1894.
Quirky·Travis County
The O. Henry Pun-Off
The longest running pun competition in the world is held on the lawn of a small Victorian cottage in downtown Austin, and it has been going since 1978. The house was rented by William Sydney Porter in the 1890s, before he was convicted of embezzlement, served three years, and emerged writing short stories as O. Henry. The stories turn on wordplay and reversal, so a pun contest at his house is a more coherent joke than it first appears.
History·Travis County
The Ritz On Sixth
The Ritz opened on the thirteenth of October, 1929, built by J. J. Hegman, and it was the first theatre in Austin constructed specifically for sound pictures. It ran first run westerns at the cheapest ticket in town, often with a country act playing live before the film. Hegman's son Elmo took over in 1937 and widened the building by twenty five feet to seat eight hundred, then closed it in 1964 when television took the audience away. What happened next is the part that matters to Austin music.
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, and she went on collecting them for the next seventy seven years, stopping only when she died in 1990. Her family gave the whole collection, more than two and a half thousand pieces, to the Columbus Historical Preservation Trust, and a local benefactor donated a building to put them in.
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 gins, and began making cotton filled mattresses for friends, without the buttoned tufts that were standard at the time and that tended to compress into lumps. In 1885 he invented both a process and a machine for manufacturing a felted cotton mattress at scale, and sold the result under his own name.
Quirky·Guadalupe County
The Seguin Pecan
A pecan 16 feet long and eight feet wide stands outside the Big Red Barn on Cordova Road in Seguin, Texas, just off State Highway 123. It is a fiberglass shell over a welded steel frame packed with wire mesh, built in 2011 by John Pape at his farm equipment yard with the shell applied by Red Ewald Incorporated of Karnes City, and funded and organised by that year's Leadership Seguin class, who raised something around 5,000 dollars for it.
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 annually: the work hung for a few days in a convention centre and then went home to closets and beds. They wanted somewhere the quilts could stay up long enough for people to make a journey to see them, and be looked at as art rather than as bedding.
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 was a reasonable specification for holding many tons of water in the air above a wooden town. Years later, when the city put in a modern pressurised water system, the tank came off the top and the tower had no remaining purpose, so the council resolved to demolish it. The dynamite failed.
Transport·Travis County
The Veloway
A three point one mile asphalt loop in southwest Austin, twenty three feet wide, one way clockwise, with no cars and no pedestrians on it at all. Only bicycles and skaters are permitted, which makes it a genuinely unusual piece of public infrastructure: when it was built in the early 1990s it was the first facility of its kind in the United States. It sits on more than a hundred acres of the Slaughter Creek Metropolitan Park, and it exists because of a specific moment in Austin development.
Music History·Travis County
The White Horse
A honky tonk that opened on Comal Street in December 2011 and immediately became the centre of gravity for country music in East Austin. Nathan Hill and Denis O'Donnell built it deliberately: O'Donnell had managed the Hole in the Wall for years, and the idea was a room where the honky tonk players they most respected could work several nights a week rather than occasionally. That residency model is what makes it worth stopping for.
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 freeway on earth, a claim that holds comfortably if the frontage roads are counted and becomes arguable if they are not, and either way it is a startling amount of pavement to cross in the first ten minutes of a drive to Austin.
Entertainment·Travis County
The Zilker Eagle
A miniature train has run through Zilker Park, on and off, since the twenty second of April, 1961, when a toy store owner and a railroad worker put the first one on the ground and called it the Austin Eagle. It hauled generations of children on a slow loop past Barton Springs and along Barton Creek, and it retired in 1996 after thirty five years. The city replaced it in 1997 with the Zilker Zephyr, which ran until heavy rain in 2019 eroded the roadbed badly enough to close it.
Education·Travis County
Thinkery
Austin's children's museum stands on what used to be a runway. Robert Mueller Municipal Airport handled the city's commercial flights from 1930 until 1999, close enough to downtown that jets came in low over the eastern neighbourhoods, and when it closed the seven hundred acre site was redeveloped as the Mueller district. Thinkery opened here in 2013 as the new home of the Austin Children's Museum, which had been operating downtown since the 1980s.
Film History·Burnet County
Uptown Theatre
The Uptown Theatre on Main Street in Marble Falls opened in 1942 and became a single screen movie house in the Streamline Moderne style, and it has closed and reopened so many times since that its history reads like a list of rescues. A fire shut it for a period. It came back in the 1990s as the Marble Theater, operated by Gene and Susan Spitzer, and closed again in the early 2000s, once a multiplex had opened in town.
Music History·Gillespie County
Viva Terlingua
The dance hall at Luckenbach is where Jerry Jeff Walker and the Lost Gonzo Band recorded Viva Terlingua in August 1973, an album that helped make the hall famous. The band set up in the empty hall over several days and cut most of the record without an audience. Two songs were taped live in front of a crowd: Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother, written by Ray Wylie Hubbard, and London Homesick Blues, by Gary P. Nunn, which became the closing theme of the television series Austin City Limits.
Entertainment·Burnet County
Walkway of Lights
Lakeside Park, on Lake Marble Falls, is the home of the Walkway of Lights, a Christmas display that began in 1990 with some lit persimmon trees and grew into more than two million lights. It was the idea of Ron Mitchell, a Horseshoe Bay resident who had seen Austin's Trail of Lights and wanted a display in Marble Falls that would make the water glow, and he worked with Pat Burton, who brought in the persimmons, and a larger group of volunteers to set up the first one.
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 downtown La Grange that year, and their first steady customers were the crews laying the first pipeline through Fayette County.
Quirky·Hays County
Wimberley Glassworks
Tim de Jong came to Texas on holiday in 1991, decided to stay, and opened a glassblowing studio here the following year. Wimberley Glassworks has occupied its current building on Ranch Road 12 since 2006, and it does something few working studios do: it gives the furnace floor over to the public. Free hot-glass demonstrations run on a schedule through the week, close enough that you feel the heat coming off the glory hole.
Quirky·Travis County
You're My Butter Half
A slice of bread on one side, a pat of butter on the other, a red heart between them, and a pun underneath. John Rockwell and the team from the Austin agency Creative Suitcase painted this on the east wall of the United Way for Greater Austin building on Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard in 2012, as part of a rebranding job for the charity. They volunteered two days to do it. Rockwell has said the idea came out of his teenage years working at a dairy in Wisconsin.
Entertainment·Travis County
Zilker Hillside Theater
A grass amphitheatre on the slope above Barton Springs Road, with a stage built in 1938 and a summer musical running on it every year since 1959. The first production was a show called Seventeen, cast largely with high school students, and about four hundred people watched it. The audience now runs to more than sixty five thousand across a season, and it has never cost anything to attend. That is the unusual part.