In Praise of Magnolia, the ‘Greatest Little Town’ in Texas
November 21, 2023 | By Meadow Chase
November 21, 2023 | By Meadow Chase
August 22, 2023 | By Nicole Beckley
July 25, 2023 | By Christopher Collins
June 27, 2023 | By Cynthia J. Drake
March 28, 2023 | By Kathleen Kaska
December 29, 2022 | By Omar L. Gallaga
November 23, 2022 | By Heather Brand
October 27, 2022 | By Regina L. Burns
September 29, 2022 | By Brooke A. Lewis
August 25, 2022 | By Heather Brand
July 28, 2022 | By Gary Borders
June 30, 2022 | By Matt Joyce
April 28, 2022 | By Heather Brand
March 24, 2022 | By Russell A. Graves
February 24, 2022 | By Omar Gallaga
January 27, 2022 | By Brooke A. Lewis
December 23, 2021 | By Heather Brand
November 24, 2021 | By Sarah Thurmond
October 28, 2021 | By Heather Brand
September 23, 2021 | By Heather Brand
August 26, 2021 | By Russell A. Graves
July 29, 2021 | By Omar L. Gallaga
June 24, 2021 | By Russell A. Graves
February 25, 2021 | By Sarah Thurmond
January 28, 2021 | By Jason Boyett
December 24, 2020 | By Regina L. Burns
October 29, 2020 | By Gary Borders
September 24, 2020 | By Lisa Bubert
August 27, 2020 | By Clayton Maxwell
July 30, 2020 | By John Lumpkin
June 25, 2020 | By Julia Jones
May 28, 2020 | By Clayton Maxwell
March 26, 2020 | By Matt Joyce
January 30, 2020 | By David Montgomery
December 27, 2019 | By Jason Boyett
November 27, 2019 | By Heather Brand
October 31, 2019 | By Joe Nick Patoski
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.’”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.