My Hometown: Born of Turbulent Times, Mason Today Offers Hill Country Peace and Charm
When writer and historian Scott Zesch walks through the central square of Mason, everybody he meets has something to say, a question to ask, or a handshake to offer. You’re likely to be a familiar fellow around town when your great-great grandfather settled in the area from Germany in the mid-1850s, you went to Mason High School, and you’re known for throwing rollicking chili parties. First settled as a fort in 1851, Mason formed as a community of Old World settlers scratching out a new life in harsh Comanche country. Zesch brings this history to life in his award-winning book, The Captured: A True Story of Abduction by Indians on the Texas Frontier, which chronicles the lives of nine kidnapped children, including his great-great-great uncle Adolph Korn. Here Zesch, who lives on his nearby family ranch with his wife, Amelia, muses on Mason’s past and present. Read More »
Historian and Author Lonn Taylor on Growing up in the Philippines and Settling in the Big Bend
Now 78 years old, Taylor is an old-fashioned raconteur with a bushy mustache, Stetson Open Road hat, and an assortment of snappy bow ties. He’s also the author of more than half a dozen books and a historian who draws inspiration from his adopted home of the Big Bend. Read More »
One Artist’s Mission to Make Rankin the Most Painted Town in Texas
Artist Matt Tumlinson has made it his mission to quite literally “paint the town” of Rankin, a West Texas community with a population of around 800. The once-barren walls of Rankin, which lies in Upton County an hour south of Midland, are now decorated with Tumlinson’s quirky murals that often portray a Texan sense of humor. One of his murals is of Willie Nelson painted in the style of Greek religious iconography. Another that’s “turned some heads,” as Tumlinson puts it, features two cowboys on horseback looking at a selfie stick. In another, John Wayne dressed a professor depicts his famous quote, “Life is tough, but it’s tougher if you’re stupid,” as a graph on a chalkboard. 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 »
How Beaumont Photographer Keith Carter Redefined the Artform
He’s one of the world’s great photographers, with a legendary sense for the mystery in the mundane. But right now he’s at home in Beaumont, and his longtime assistant, Cathy Spence, is calling for help from a side door. Read More »
Empress of Gulf Coast Soul Barbara Lynn Reflects on Her Decades-Long Career
Barbara Lynn was a left-handed young girl in Beaumont when she started sounding out notes and chords on a guitar made for right-handed musicians. She’s always done things her own way. The pioneering sound that grew out of those childhood guitar rhythms—fiery and percussive, complemented by her soulful singing voice and a poet’s command of songwriting—took Lynn around the world, from Beaumont to the Apollo Theater in Harlem, and to the top of the charts in 1962. Read More »
A Cancer Survivor on the Healing Nature of Birds
The first time I encountered whooping cranes, my wife and I were stationed on an observation tower on the dry ... Read More »
My Hometown: ‘Unofficial Ambassador’ Faye Landham Dishes on Granbury’s Charms
During karaoke night at D’Vine Wine on the Granbury Square, Faye Landham works the crowd. Amid off-key singing and wine-fueled laughter, Landham, a regular at this lively gathering, greets friends and strangers alike with the latest town news and happenings. It quickly becomes clear why Landham is known around Granbury as an “unofficial ambassador.” Read More »
Remembering Texas Highways Founding Editor Frank Lively
We lost a true Texas treasure on Nov. 18 with the passing of travel industry titan and Texas Highways founder Frank Lively at age 90. In May 1974, Frank repurposed an internal highway department publication into a travel magazine—in his words, a “showpiece for Texas.” Within a year, the Texas Legislature had named the 33-page monthly “The Official Travel Magazine of Texas,” declaring that “every effort be made to enlarge its growing family of readers.” Read More »
Austin Hotelier Liz Lambert Talks Texas—from Midland to Marfa to South Congress
Penny the Chihuahua greets visitors with an inspection sniff outside the elevator leading to Bunkhouse, the ... Read More »
My Hometown: Southwestern History Runs Deep in the Border Town of San Elizario
Explore the adobe streets of this colonial Spanish presidio town with artist and history buff Al Borrego. As he guides walking tours of San Elizario, Al Borrego paints a vivid picture of the town’s 400 years of borderland adventure and enterprise. On Main Street, Borrego describes the day in 1598 when explorer Juan de Oñate marched through with an expedition of 500 colonists. Outside the immaculate San Elizario presidio chapel, Borrego explains how the community was actually south of the Rio Grande until an 1829 flood realigned the river. Read More »
Sarah Bird’s New Historical Novel Is Wild as an Acre of Snakes
In the debut of Texas Highways’ new monthly essay, Open Road, novelist Sarah Bird writes about walking the trails of J. Frank Dobie’s Paisano Ranch in the Texas Hill Country with the ghost of Cathy Williams, the only woman to join the Buffalo Soldiers, the African American army regiment formed after the Civil War. Since 1978, when Bird first heard about Williams at an African American rodeo, she had hoped Williams’ remarkable but mostly forgotten story would be told. After almost 40 years of waiting in vain, Bird decided that she would have to tell the story herself. The resulting novel—her 10th—is an exuberant, mind-opening page-turner of historical fiction, Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen. Read More »
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