Texas

70 places with something worth saying about them.

• Acme, Texas Miners digging gypsum here turned up mastodon fossils.
• Alvord, Texas Alvord had more people in 1925 than it did in 2010, and the collapse came down to watermelons.
• American Quarter Horse Association A magazine article asked readers to show up in Fort Worth, and the registry that resulted now lists more than two and a half million horses.
• Argyle, Texas An outlaw is rumored to have hidden sixty thousand dollars in stolen gold coins in a cave near here, and he died before he could dig it up.
• Big Texan Steak Ranch A cowboy won five dollars eating four and a half pounds of steak in an hour, and the restaurant has been giving that meal away free ever since.
• Bowie, Texas Four men robbed the bank in Bowie in 1884, and the townspeople caught them and hanged them.
• Bremond, Texas A man tasted the local water in 1878, started bottling it, and turned this small Texas town into a resort with four hotels.
• Bridgeport, Texas A man drilling for water here in 1882 hit a vein of coal instead, and it set the town's course for the next fifty years.
• Bryan, Texas When a chemical warehouse caught fire here in 2009, firefighters decided the safest thing to do was stand back and let it burn.
• Cadillac Ranch In 1974 a man calling himself Leo Wyoming ran newspaper ads in Amarillo seeking used Cadillacs that need not run.
• Calvert, Texas A town of under a thousand people once claimed the largest cotton gin in the world.
• Childress, Texas The man who wrote the Texas Declaration of Independence had been dead more than forty years before this town took his name.
• Chillicothe, Texas The electric starting gate that releases racehorses was invented by a man born in this town of about five hundred people.
• Clarendon, Texas Cowboys called this town Saints Roost, because a Methodist preacher built it to be dry.
• DATCU Stadium The students of North Texas voted to tax themselves about eight hundred forty dollars each to pay for this football stadium.
• Dalhart Army Air Base The only squadron that ever flew an atomic bombing mission trained on the flat land outside Dalhart, Texas.
• Decatur, Texas Craps players calling for an eight have been shouting the name of this town for generations.
• Delta Air Lines Flight 1141 Minutes before the crash, the crew joked about what to say on the cockpit recorder in case they crashed.
• Dimmitt, Texas A rock that fell out of the sky carries this town's name, and it is one of three hundred eleven meteorites Texas has on the books.
• Diocese of Amarillo In 1981 the bishop of Amarillo told workers assembling the neutron bomb to quit their jobs.
• Electra, Texas A rancher drilling for drinking water kept hitting crude oil, and the water came up undrinkable.
• Elizabethtown, Texas This town was called Bugtown because insects once swarmed a revival meeting so thickly the preacher had to quit.
• Estelline, Texas A town of about a hundred and twenty people got nearly ninety percent of its money from traffic fines and seized property.
• Flower Mound, Texas A federally backed plan to build a whole new city here collapsed when residents threatened to cut the land loose from the town.
• Fort Richardson (Texas) In 1872 the largest army post in the United States sat in a small town in north Texas, with 666 officers and men.
• Gateway Church (Texas) In a single year, roughly twenty thousand people walked away from this church, about a quarter of its entire membership.
• George H. W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum When this museum reopened after renovation, the former president showed up by parachute.
• Glen Rose Formation The first sauropod footprints ever scientifically documented were found in a Texas riverbed, and some are three feet across.
• Grapevine Lake Four bones found beside this Texas reservoir belonged to a bird that lived ninety-six million years ago.
• Grapevine, Texas For decades a sign outside town called Grapevine the Cantaloupe Capital of the World.
• Hearne, Texas The high school in Hearne, Texas, holds classes inside a former Wal-Mart.
• Henrietta, Texas Henrietta was wiped off the map twice before settlers managed to stay.
• Hereford, Texas The water here has so much natural fluoride that the town called itself The Town Without a Toothache.
• Iowa Park, Texas Before it was Iowa Park, this stop on the railroad was called Daggett Switch.
• Lake Bridgeport (Texas) The dam here went up as one piece of a much larger scheme to tame the Trinity River, begun the year the Depression started.
• Lake Bryan This lake exists to cool a power plant, and somebody stocked it with saltwater redfish.
• Lewisville Lake While building the dam here, Army engineers stumbled onto artifacts that seemed to say people lived in Texas thirty-six thousand years ago.
• Lewisville, Texas Thirteen days after Woodstock, a small Texas town drew a hundred and fifty thousand people to hear Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin.
• Marlin, Texas Marlin went looking for drinking water in 1891 and hit hot mineral water by accident, and the whole town rebuilt itself around it.
• Masterson, Texas Before the first well was drilled here, the geologist told investors flat out that nobody knew whether there was any gas under the Texas Panhandle at all.
• Megargel, Texas A whole downtown went up in three months because buyers got a discount for opening a business fast.
• Memphis, Texas Trains wouldn't stop here, so townspeople smeared the rails with lye soap until the railroad gave in.
• Millican massacre A rumor about one missing man set off three days of violence in a Texas railroad town, and historians still cannot agree whether five people died or a hundred and fifty.
• Navasota, Texas The lawman who later hunted down Bonnie and Clyde got his start cleaning up a Texas town where a hundred men died in street shootouts in two years.
• North Lake (Dallas) A popular Dallas water sports lake shut down in 2000, and the suspected reason was amoebas thriving in water warmed by a power plant.
• Pioneer Woman (Friedlander) The winning design for a monument to Texas pioneer women showed the whole family, naked.
• Prestonwood Baptist Church This church has its own football stadium, a baseball field, a fitness center, a café, a library and a bookstore, all on one campus.
• Quanah, Texas A man from this small Texas town is credited with saving Chartres Cathedral during World War Two.
• Ranchman's Ponder Steakhouse A Pulitzer Prize winning novel got its name inside a small-town Texas steakhouse.
• Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport The first airplane ever to land in Amarillo came down in a pasture, then refueled at a street corner.
• Riesel, Texas A town of about a thousand people voted to borrow twenty-five million dollars for its schools.
• Runaway Bay, Texas A chupacabra turned up on the golf course here, and it took a state biologist to explain it.
• Seymour, Texas The hottest temperature ever recorded in Texas was measured here, on a summer afternoon in 1936.
• St. Vincent's Cathedral A new North American denomination was founded inside a suburban church in Bedford, Texas.
• Texas A&M University College of Geosciences The tallest building on the Texas A&M campus is an oceanography building, in a town nowhere near an ocean.
• Texas Air & Space Museum One plane in this museum was flown forty-nine times by the man the airport is named after, who died aboard Columbia.
• Texas International Pop Festival Two weeks after Woodstock, a field outside Lewisville drew a hundred and fifty thousand people to see Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin and B.B. King.
• Texas Motor Speedway The first IndyCar race at Texas Motor Speedway ended with the wrong man in victory lane and a fistfight to sort it out.
• Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum The archive inside this Waco museum has been pulled back into real police work, helping Texas Rangers reopen cold cases.
• Texas Reds Festival A steak and wine festival in downtown Bryan once pulled twenty thousand people from eighteen states and four countries, then quietly vanished.
• Texas Woman's University More than three hundred art students built the stained glass, doors and woodwork of a Denton chapel that Eleanor Roosevelt came to dedicate.
• Texas World Speedway A two-mile superspeedway with banked turns and seating for twenty-six thousand is now a housing subdivision.
• Texas's 13th congressional district In 2012, Barack Obama got a smaller share of the vote here than in any other congressional district in the country.
• Texas's 17th congressional district A map was redrawn specifically to unseat one congressman, and he survived it for six more years.
• Texas's 26th congressional district A Democrat won this district exactly once, in 1982, and no Democrat has cracked forty percent since.
• University of North Texas A physics building in Denton holds four particle accelerators in about four thousand square feet of floor space.
• Vashti, Texas A man named a Texas post office after his favorite niece, then made her the postmistress.
• Vernon, Texas The post office rejected this town's chosen name because too many Texas towns were already called Eagle something.
• Warren Wagon Train raid About a hundred and eighty Kiowa warriors watched General Sherman ride past and let him go, because a shaman had told them to wait.
• Westlake, Texas In the late 1990s, Westlake's own town board tried to put the town out of existence.