Texas Highways Managing Editor Among New Members of the Texas Institute of Letters
The Texas Institute of Letters has spent the past eight decades recognizing the state's literary achievements. Lone Star pride hit fever pitch in 1936. Amid statewide celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the Texas Revolution, statues, monuments, and commemorative museums were going up everywhere from Huntsville to Alpine and Corpus Christi to Lubbock. Read More »
A New Texan Finds Beauty and Solitude Amongst the Living and the Dead in Terlingua
I live 4,900 miles away from England, where I was born, on any day of the week. But on that day, home was getting farther away still. It’s not just the eight-hour drive with my family from Austin, where we now live, to Terlingua. It’s something else, something farther than the distance … everything is left behind en route. Read More »
Fossils Tell a Story of Vanished Worlds in Big Bend National Park
The northbound road through Big Bend National Park winds between scab-colored volcanic hills and the baking white flats of the Chihuahuan Desert. During the day, little moves out here but the wind; the heat presses down heavy and hard on the rock shelves. The landscape feels frozen, dry, and dead. In a word, timeless. Read More »
Find Relics of Rural Justice in Guidebook to Texas’ Tiny Jails
Long before the tiny home craze, Texas was home to an abundance of tiny jails. A night in the slammer was ... Read More »
How a Bunch of “Hippies, Pickers, Slackers, and Geeks” Transformed Austin
In Austin, the funky slacker paradise turned buzzy big city, nothing is quite as certain as cedar fever, the line at Franklin Barbecue, a daily arrival of newbies—and relative old-timers who stand ready to reminisce about the city’s good old days. Joe Nick Patoski calls it the “You should have been here two years ago” effect. Read More »
New Bullock Museum Exhibit Explores Early Texas History
Photo Courtesy of Bullock Texas State History Museum With the completion of a ground-floor renovation, the ... Read More »
The Presnall-Watson Homestead in San Antonio Welcomes Hikers, Bikers, and Equestrians
Aseemingly incongruous site greets Saturday afternoon visitors at the Presnall-Watson Homestead, a rambling 19th-century farmhouse along the Medina River in south San Antonio. Kids on bicycles kick out tricks as horseback riders in cowboy regalia round the corner, creating a surprising mash-up of three centuries crammed into one. Read More »
A Music-Industry Veteran Breathes New Life Into a Classic Small-Town Venue
From the outside looking in, the Texas dance hall appears to be a pretty basic proposition: live music in a big building with a stage at one end and a dance floor in the middle. It’s the other, smaller details that separate the classic dance halls from the rest. Read More »
Downtown Christmas Lights in the Capital City in 1947
Austin had a population of about 115,000 when photographer Neal Douglass took this picture of Congress Avenue looking north to the Texas State Capitol on New Year’s Day 1947. The streetscape has changed over the past 71 years, and Austin has grown 10-fold to about 1 million people. But the electric Paramount Theatre sign, which was replaced in 2015, and the State Capitol building, which was completed in 1888, still anchor the storied strip. Read More »
Home on the Texas Range, Where the Longhorns and Bison Play
An up-close visit with a Longhorn or bison can be humbling. The animals’ large chestnut-brown eyes reveal a complex blend of wild animal and domesticated stock. It’s hard to know whether they’re plotting an aggressive charge or happily anticipating a bucket of feed. Read More »
My Hometown: Explore San Felipe with the Town Mayor, a Descendant of a Slave from the Days of Stephen F. Austin’s First Colony
San Felipe, the hub of Stephen F. Austin’s original colony, may be the most historically significant Texas town you’ve never heard of. But that’s understandable: In 1836, residents burned San Felipe to the ground to keep it from the hands of the advancing Mexican army after the fall of the Alamo. The entire town—homes, taverns, one of the earliest print shops in Texas—was left in ashes, and few of its citizens returned. Read More »
On the West Texas Frontier, Judge Roy Bean Doled Out Justice as the ‘Law West of the Pecos’
Perched on a dusty ridge overlooking the Rio Grande, the tiny town of Langtry lies in the thick of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands, about 60 miles west of Del Rio. Langtry sprang up in 1882 as a railroad camp during the construction of the Southern Pacific line. Among the profiteers following the railroad was Roy Bean, a tent-saloon operator who became Langtry’s justice of the peace. Read More »
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