My Hometown

Andrew Stuart is the poster boy for the “next best place.” Raised in Austin, Stuart lived on both coasts before falling in love with West Texas. He spent two years as a reporter for the now-defunct Desert-Mountain Times in Alpine and three years as the news director at Marfa Public Radio. In 2009, he moved to Dell City, a Chihuahuan Desert farming community with little but a mercantile, a gas station, and two cafés. It’s a place once described by The New York Times as a “borderline ghost town.” But factor in the Guadalupe Mountains—the area’s primary tourist attraction, rising 20 miles to the east—and the feeling that you’re out in the middle of nowhere, and it’s easy to see Stuart, 44, has found his place. “I knew I wanted to live in the desert by myself, a go-west-and-reinvent-yourself kind of thing,” he explains one morning over breakfast tacos at Spanish Angels Café. “The writer Marilynne Robinson said, ‘Out west, lonesome is a positive.’”

My Hometown: Rooted In the Railroad and Blues Music, Navasota Chugs With Cultural Vibrancy

September 30, 2019 | By Heather Brand

Navasota has long stoked history buffs’ imaginations. It was, after all, the area where historians believe French explorer Sieur de La Salle was murdered in 1687. Then, as a 19th-century railhead on the Navasota River, the town bustled with both commerce and unsavory characters with little regard for the law.

My Hometown: A True-Blue Rangerette Explains Why There’s More to Kilgore Than Oil and the Drill Team

August 21, 2019 | By

“People automatically associate Kilgore with oil and Rangerettes,” says Shelley Wayne, who should know. Wayne’s husband works in the petrochemical business, her daughter was a Rangerette, and Wayne herself was a member of Kilgore College’s world-famous drill team before becoming its choreographer. But she adds, “There is much more to this town.” Founded in 1872 by the Great Northern Railroad, Kilgore changed dramatically with the discovery of oil in 1930. Derricks soon crowded downtown, comprising the “World’s Richest Acre”—today a collection of restored derricks along a manicured downtown strip.

My Hometown: A Weslaco Native on the Bicultural Beauty of His Rio Grande Valley Burg

July 10, 2019 | By Cynthia J. Drake

A stroll through downtown Weslaco feels like a visit to a bygone era, when
department stores and hardware shops in Spanish colonial buildings lined the streets. Founded in 1919, Weslaco grew into a farming hub, famous as the home of the ruby red grapefruit and 1015 onion. The same mild climate that attracted farmers makes Weslaco a hotspot today for winter Texans—typically retirees from cold climates—and birders, who come to see Rio Grande Valley specialties like the green jay. When the town slows down in the summer, locals refresh with icy raspas and beach trips to nearby South Padre Island.

My Hometown: Luther Hotel Innkeeper Jack Findley Talks History and Having Fun on Tres Palacios Bay

June 10, 2019 | By Heather Brand

At the historic Luther Hotel in Palacios, proprietor Jack Findley often mingles with guests on the front porch overlooking Matagorda Bay. Findley’s path to Palacios was circuitous.

My Hometown: Take a Tour of Decatur with Longtime Newspaper Publishers Roy and Jeannine Eaton

April 23, 2019 | By John Lumpkin

Roy Eaton’s earliest memory of the Wise County Messenger was his parents eagerly awaiting its Thursday delivery during World War II for news about local servicemen. “Many were our friends and neighbors,” recalls Roy, who would leave the family ranch near Decatur for college, become a TV news anchor in Fort Worth, marry his high school sweetheart, Jeannine Eaton, and return with her in 1973 to buy the weekly newspaper his parents read.

My Hometown: Donna Painter-Based Gabriel Salazar Talks About His Love for the Rio Grande Valley

March 21, 2019 | By Clayton Maxwell

Landscape painter Gabriel Salazar has long been inspired by the lush fields of citrus and palms surrounding Donna. As a boy, with the help of his father’s American employer, Salazar immigrated to this Rio Grande Valley town from a small community near Monterrey,

My Hometown: Artist Lindy Chambers Finds Inspiration Along the Backroads of Bellville

March 1, 2019 | By Cynthia J. Drake

When Lindy Chambers drives along the backroads of her hometown of Bellville, she often pulls over to take photos of dilapidated trailer homes or to collect the detritus that many people would pass off as junk—later to be resurrected in her artwork. A self-taught oil painter and sculptor known for colorful depictions of country life, Chambers moved from Hockley to this historic seat of Austin County about 20 years ago.

My Hometown: Born of Turbulent Times, Mason Today Offers Hill Country Peace and Charm

January 29, 2019 | By Clayton Maxwell

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.

My Hometown: ‘Unofficial Ambassador’ Faye Landham Dishes on Granbury’s Charms

December 19, 2018 | By Cynthia J. Drake

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.”

My Hometown: Southwestern History Runs Deep in the Border Town of San Elizario

November 28, 2018 | By Matt Joyce

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.

My Hometown: Explore San Felipe with the Town Mayor, a Descendant of a Slave from the Days of Stephen F. Austin’s First Colony

October 25, 2018 | By

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.

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