“It didn’t just appear in Groom,” Vince Britten says of the water tower that reads “Britten U.S.A.” along Interstate 40’s westbound frontage road. Also known as the Leaning Tower of Texas, the structure rests at a seemingly precarious angle, and has been catching travelers’ attention since the late Ralph Britten installed it in the early 1980s.
The tower isn’t the tallest or most popular roadside attraction in Groom, a town of 549 in the Texas Panhandle. That designation goes to the 190-foot Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ monument on the other side of town, closer to Amarillo. But the Britten tower is definitely the quirkiest, and as travelers motor to the Texas Route 66 Festival, taking place June 5-14 in Amarillo, they’ll notice it.
They always do.
“I had someone come in and ask if we knew that tower was leaning,” says Maddie Merritt, an employee of The Den on Route 66, a coffee shop nearby. Merritt assured them she was aware of it. Everyone in Groom was aware of it. “They were like, ‘Yes, but it’s leaning really bad.’”
Ralph’s clever marketing idea is still working.
Vince Britten was around 18 and the youngest of eight children when his father, a former Army Air Corps engineer, bought a water tower from a gas plant near Lefors, about 30 miles away. “He was wanting to put in a truck stop [in Groom] and needed a water supply, so he bought that tower,” Vince says.
Next came the challenge of getting the tower, standing 22 feet wide and 75 feet tall, from Lefors to Groom. “We had to figure out how to move it,” Vince says. Lowering the tower onto its side, the Brittens hauled the tower across farmland and dirt roads, sometimes opening up fences and reassembling them after passing through. “That was quite a task, just to move it 30 miles,” Vince remembers.
After it arrived at the property, the tower spent the next two years horizontal as the family finished the truck stop. Vince helped apply the original red and white paint while the structure remained on its side.
It attracted attention even then. Chatter from truckers on CB radios constantly referred to the sideways tower. Some speculated a tornado had blown it down.
When Ralph finally stood the tower upright, the CB conversations stopped. “Nobody ever talked about it,” Vince says. That gave the elder Britten an idea. For ground support and stability, the tower had horizontal braces, or crossbars, connecting the legs and extending 25 or 30 feet past them along the ground. Ralph anchored two of the four water tower legs to concrete pillars, then dug two trenches for the crossbars. Using construction equipment, he lifted the other two legs off the ground and let the braces settle into the trenches, like outriggers. Those got covered with dirt.
Britten cut the braces off the airborne side and left those two legs hovering 2 to 3 feet off the ground. (One is slightly higher than the other.) The tower leans about five degrees from vertical. Travelers can see the angle. What they don’t see are the buried braces, which work like a bicycle kickstand. The airborne legs may bounce a few inches on a windy day, but that tower isn’t about to fall.
Emblazoned with “Britten U.S.A.” in red, white and blue, the leaning tower became an immediate roadside attraction, encouraging drivers to stop along the Mother Road for photographs and a meal at the Tower Fuel Stop in Groom. The encouragement worked.
“Ralph Britten was a marketing genius, even if he didn’t go to school to learn it,” says Nick Gerlich, Ph.D., a Route 66 historian and the Hickman Professor of Marketing at nearby West Texas A&M University in Canyon. Britten’s tower simply served as a giant outdoor billboard for his business. “He set the hook, and travelers took the bait.”
Contrary to some reports, the family never filled the tower with water in order to balance it or otherwise get the physics right. “If there’s any water in there, it’s because it rained,” Vince says, pointing out that it’s mostly filled with pigeon excrement.
The tower still stands but Ralph’s truck stop is gone, having burned to the ground in 1988. “Insurance was so outrageously high, being out there, he [decided not to] insure it one year. It burned down six months later,” Vince says, due to an electrical fire that started in the kitchen. The fire also destroyed most of the photos related to the tower’s move and installation.
Ralph never rebuilt the truck stop. He ended up moving to Amarillo, where he bought and sold farm equipment until he died in 2000.
The leaning tower, securely in place east of Groom, remains a monument to the Britten name and his off-kilter sense of outdoor advertising. Vince and his siblings repaint it every few years. A cousin, John Britten, keeps the “Britten U.S.A.” lettering crisp and legible.
“My dad wanted to be buried underneath the water tower. He thought the world of it,” Vince says, a hand resting on one of the airborne legs. “But it turns out you can’t just be buried anywhere you want to be buried.” Ralph was buried at Saint Mary’s Cemetery in Groom. But his ongoing monument is the tower that bears his name. And it keeps doing what he meant it to do: get travelers’ attention.
