Ranchman's Ponder Steakhouse

Texas

A Pulitzer Prize winning novel got its name inside a small-town Texas steakhouse.

cultureroadsidehistorical

Larry McMurtry said the name Lonesome Dove came to him at a steakhouse in Ponder, Texas. The book won the Pulitzer Prize in nineteen eighty-six. The place that inspired the title was a roadside diner called Ranchman's, known for steaks, chicken-fried steaks, and pies. It had a second life on screen too. The building appears in the nineteen sixty-seven film Bonnie and Clyde. Decades later, Bobby Flay brought a Food Network crew through for FoodNation. None of that started as a restaurant story. The building went up in nineteen oh three. A barbershop once operated on the spot where the grill later sat. After the Great Depression, a family turned it into a hardware and general store. Then came Thanksgiving Day of nineteen forty-eight. A woman named Grace Jackson, called Pete, opened the doors of Ranchman's. She had watched the lunch counter at her grocery store next door draw crowds, and decided to give the food its own building.

This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
The location is said to be the location where 1986 Pulitzer Prize winning novel Lonesome Dove got its name, according to the book's author Larry McMurtry.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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