Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2021 i Texas Highways Magazine

If you’ve spent significant time on Houston roadways over the past few decades, you’ve probably seen one: a low-slung, candy-colored vintage sedan, like a Jolly Rancher on wheels, with its rims poking out and a spare tire mounted on the rear bumper. Even before you saw it, you may have felt the teethrattling bass and heard the molasses-slow rhythm of Houston hip-hop emanating from the stereo system in the trunk. If so, you were in the presence of a “slab,” Houston’s distinctive contribution to American car culture. One of the foremost practitioners of this art form is Kevin Mitchell, aka “Meyagi,” a chemical operator at National Oilwell Varco who lives in the Houston suburb of Pearland and has been building slabs since the early 2000s. On a Friday afternoon in…

The 2018 movie Green Book captivated audiences with its depiction of a Black concert pianist and his white driver touring the segregated South of the 1960s. While winning three Academy Awards, the movie also shed new light on its namesake, The Negro Travelers’ Green Book, a little-known but influential guide published annually from 1936 to ’66. Victor Green, a postal service worker from Harlem, created the guide to, as he explained in the 1949 edition, help the African American traveler avoid “difficulties, embarrassments and to make his trips more enjoyable.” Without such information, African Americans might book a hotel room, for instance, only to find upon arrival that they weren’t allowed on the property. Businesses in over 20 Texas cities advertised in the Green Book, including some in Austin, Dallas,…

When Rae Wilson planted her first grapevines on 2 acres near Johnson City in 2014, she was throwing herself into an ambitious experiment. The sommelier had been interested in transitioning to the winemaking side of the business for several years, a somewhat uncommon move in the industry. But even more unusual was her attempt to grow her own grapes, a job most winemakers leave to farmers. Wilson didn’t expect to make wine anytime soon, as new vines can take a few years to produce. But shortly after her inaugural attempt at farming, another winemaker offered her extra grapes that were of the same Southern French varietals she had planted. She used them to make a very small batch of Dandy Rosé, her first wine. While her vines never bore fruit…

Abernathy came to life in 1909 when the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway sliced a path across the wide-open High Plains between Lubbock and Plainview. Today, Interstate 27 follows the same route, giving motorists expansive views of the region’s agricultural base. Lee Jackson grew up here on his family’s cotton farm, 4 miles east of Abernathy, before enlisting in the Air Force in 1974. He spent three years as a military aviation mechanic and then returned to his hometown, where he earned an airplane mechanic license and taught classes at a community college operating at Lubbock’s now-closed Reese Air Force Base. Eventually, Jackson’s technical expertise and teaching career took him to Houston and Atlanta. He got his pilot’s license along the way and finally landed back in Abernathy, where…

Masonry arch bridges are among the earliest built in Texas, recalling ancient Roman designs. Arch bridges surged in popularity during the Works Projects Administration’s bridgebuilding era following the Great Depression. Suspension bridges use vertical hangers to carry the load of the deck, or bridge surface. The 1870 Waco Suspension Bridge influenced Texasbred designs including the 1928 Roma-Ciudad Miguel Alemán International Bridge, the last suspension bridge remaining on the Rio Grande. Cable-stayed bridges support decks with a fan-like spread of cables attached to towers. The 1890 Bluff Dale Bridge on the Paluxy River is the oldest bridge of this type in Texas. Metal truss bridges, pioneered by the rail industry, were the go-to design from 1880 to 1930, with thousands constructed initially of wrought iron and then steel. The 1959 Corpus…

As the old literary adage put it: The past is a foreign country. While international travel may be currently out of reach, vintage tourism guides can take you back in time to explore a Texas both familiar and exotic. Travel guides first appeared in the early 1910s, when roads were little more than rutted wagon trails and motor vehicles were a rare but expanding convenience. Various publishers put their spins on the format over the years, from early turn-by-turn manuals all the way up to today’s GPS-based mobile apps. Guidebooks have a peculiar shelf life—practical at first, then nearly worthless once they become repositories of outdated listings. As decades pass, a stage of permanent interest emerges, this time as a historical document, or in some cases even literature. Award-winning Kansas-based…

Among the many “alphabet soup” agencies President Franklin D. Roosevelt created, the Works Progress Administration was the largest, and within the WPA, thousands of jobless writers found work within the Federal Writers’ Project. Today, one of its best-known and most lasting works is the American Guide Series. In his foreword for Texas: A Guide to the Lone Star State, published in 1940, editor J. Frank Davis wrote of the herculean effort that went into the 718-page work, an illustrated tome with chapters on Texas history, geography, culture, agriculture, and more. The writing team logged some 15,000 road miles, through all the big cities and hundreds of towns, wrote Davis, the director of the Texas edition. The bulk of the book is given over to a total of 29 trips along…

Jambalaya: The word is so evocative that if you say it aloud, you can almost hear a jazz band playing through the streets of New Orleans. While the dish’s origin is uncertain, food historians speculate the Creole concoction of savory rice and meats came from early Spanish settlers in Louisiana. Finding no saffron in the New World, they had to cook their paella with tomatoes and local spices instead—and jambalaya was born. Making do in a strange new land is exactly what Pastor Willie Monnet and his Smoking for Jesus Ministry had to do when they evacuated New Orleans and settled in the Marble Falls area after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Having run a church, school, and restaurant together in New Orleans, this tightknit ministry of around 100 worshippers got…

Hundreds of Underground Railroad historical markers span the United States, conjuring images of covert escape routes, shrewd conductors, and clandestine connections. Such high-stakes adventure tales grip the American imagination, inspiring books and movies about antebellum liberty pursued and denied, borders permeated and fortified, identities shed and remade. But Texas is seldom mentioned in this sweeping narrative of Black pursuits of freedom. The state’s landscape is bare of monuments to resistance and flight, of the names or narratives of enslaved people who liberated themselves or died trying. When Texans think of emancipation, Juneteenth is more likely to come to mind—the holiday commemorating the 1865 date when Union soldiers landed in Galveston and announced emancipation. Yet, “the story of freedom in Texas is bigger than Juneteenth, and it started well before June…

If you’re just driving by on Interstate 35, you might blink and miss Salado. But this is not a town you want to skip past. It’s a historic village full of artists with creativity on grand display. Stagecoach Inn This historic inn has been Salado’s main attraction since it was built in 1861 along the old Chisholm Trail. Famous guests have included Sam Houston, Charles Goodnight, and, allegedly, Jesse James. For over a century, it’s been a place to rest and fill your belly with a delicious meal. And after being renovated in 2018, its offerings are better than ever. It’s hard to beat a dinner starting with the Stagecoach Inn’s famous hushpuppies and ending with the timeless Strawberry Kiss, a dessert made of ice cream, strawberry sauce, and pink…

A pearly silver hearse pauses at the mouth of Purgatory Road. The timing is so perfect it seems almost staged. I’ve been noticing the symbolism everywhere, from the rot of furred flesh melting into pavement to the painterly flourishes of crimson foliage in the hills: harbingers of death. For the first time in three years—since becoming a mother—I’ve climbed onto the back of my husband’s motorcycle, and I can’t shake the guilt of doing something selfish. Something reckless. Something that could take me away from my children, even if it brings me back to myself. Before dating my husband, Adrian, I’d never ridden a motorcycle. I thought riding was dangerous and foolish, an inherently selfish endeavor if you had people who cared about you. But Adrian is a lifelong rider,…

After years of service, some venerable bridges have been rehabilitated or repurposed when no longer safe for vehicular traffic. Flanked by two parks, the monumental Waco Suspension Bridge—the first span over the Brazos River and the earliest permanent bridge in Texas— exemplifies this adaptive reuse trend. Many metal truss spans, like the 1938 Montopolis Bridge over the Colorado River in Austin, enjoy second lives in parks as pedestrian bridges linking hike-and-bike trails.…

Drivers making their way across West Texas a century ago couldn’t rely on the high-speed convenience of Interstate 10. The Official Automobile Blue Book makes that clear: “Many of the cattle gates are of the swinging type,” the 1923 edition advises, “and by putting the car in low gear and striking the gate with just sufficient force to cause it to swing, passage can be negotiated without leaving the car.” Automobile travel swelled in the 1920s after Henry Ford invented the Model T and made cars affordable. This emancipated middle-class Americans from railroads, created a new culture of tourism, and inspired a genre of guides. Before highway numbering systems were broadly implemented, the guides of the 1920s offered detailed written instructions for navigating a hodgepodge of wagon-train trails, dirt or…

Webber Ranch Cemetery A memorial for John Ferdinand Webber sits at his family’s cemetery in Hidalgo near the Donna Pumping Station off US 281. He and his formerly enslaved wife, Silvia, settled on 8,856 acres there in 1851 after being chased out of Webberville, the Travis County town they founded in 1832, by people hostile to interracial marriage. Silvia mothered their 11 children and reportedly helped runaway enslaved people cross the Rio Grande to freedom in Mexico. The Eli Jackson Cemetery Nathaniel Jackson, a former slaveholder, led a caravan of seven families, including at least 12 emancipated people, to the border in 1857. His emancipated wife, Matilda; their children; and the rest of the travel party sought refuge from rising anti-Black violence and hostility in Alabama. The 5,535-acre ranch he…