When the state highway commission held a contest for the most beautiful gas station, home, and school “located contiguous to any designated highway” in 1936, the Wise County Messenger reported that E. F. Boydston’s gas station in the county seat of Decatur was the county’s first declared entrant.
The true winner is lost to history, but thankfully, Boydston’s station isn’t. Even then, he had reason to be confident. A year earlier, the Messenger had marveled that his “filling station and tourist camp, on the Decatur-Fort Worth highway….are constructed of vari-colored petrified wood, and the grounds are set in beautiful flowers.” Boydston advertised the compound as “The Beauty Spot on the Highway.”
Boydston built the structures in 1927 and his son, Nolan Boydston, added the distinctive petrified wood exteriors in 1935, covering the entire exterior of the complex, which included the station, cabins, and a cafe. And so it stood for decades, an odd marvel that attracted travelers in North Texas.
But with the advent of chain motels and restaurants, the Boydston complex began to shrink. The cafe was the first to go, shuttering in 1964. Then, the cabins closed “around 1970,” per the Decatur Chamber of Commerce. By 1989, the gas station itself was no more, the entire project seemingly done. Until the station passed on to the original owner’s granddaughter, who felt compelled to bring it back to its former glory.
Nolan’s daughter Nancy Rosendahl, a professional historian active with the Wise County Historical Commission, performed a complete restoration in the 1990s with her husband, Jim.
“We wanted to return it to the way it looked in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s,” she says. “The petrified wood was still in pretty good shape, so we mainly filled in a space on the south side of the station and set back up the neon sign that my father had taken down.”
At 18 feet by 3 feet, the blazing red neon once again proclaims to the heavens: PETRIFIED WOOD STATION.
A nuclear engineer, Jim Rosendahl’s office is inside the station. Though the tourist courts, where Bonnie and Clyde once hid from the law, are not open, and the station no longer sells gas, the site’s Whistle Stop Cafe serves breakfast and lunch on weekdays. Standing today on the business loop of US 287, the omnipresent petrified wood draws visitors from far and near, many of whom are keen to share the site on social media. (I first stopped by in 1995, between Texas Highways assignments in Jacksboro and Bonham.)
In a short YouTube video filmed at the station, geologist Devin Dennie explains how petrification works. He says the ancient trees were turned to stone through a “replacement process,” in which water carried minerals into the “gaps, holes, and cells” of the wood. Over eons, the minerals, most commonly silica, turn the wood to solid rock. Pointing out spots on the gas station/tourist court walls, Dennie notes that the petrification retains features of the original wood, such as tree rings, veins, and knots.
Nolan obtained his petrified wood from the nearby towns of Bridgeport and Alvord. Though the area does not contain as much stone forestry as Glen Rose, some 70 miles to the south, Wise County history reveals a number of petrified wood sightings and construction projects.
Way back in 1893, for example, newspapers from coast to coast carried a story headlined, “A TEXAS WONDER.” The report explained that “a prehistoric pavement of petrified wood, supposed to have been constructed by mound builders of an extinct race,” had been discovered on H. Richwalls’ Wise County farm, 25 miles southwest of Decatur.
An information panel at the Petrified Wood Station notes that the roadway it faces was first built in the 1910s and known as the Meridian Highway. Running from South Texas to the Canadian Border, it roughly aligned with the Sixth Principal Meridian. Called “The Main Street of North America,” it was later renamed US 81. In the 1950s it became a road less traveled after a highway bypass was constructed around Decatur.
The Texas Tourist Camp, as the historic name for the complex came to be called, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1997. “The rise of corporate America,” the Register application noted, “brought the standardization of roadside businesses, creating what some have called ‘placelessness.’”
Thus, the preservation of sites like the Petrified Wood Station to its prewar state, with its “high degree of historic and architectural integrity,” provides “a reminder of the individuality, ingenuity, and resourcefulness that truly identifies the spirit of America.”
Anyone who has basked in the red glow of the station’s mammoth sign will surely agree.
