Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2025 i Texas Highways Magazine

In Memoriam I really enjoyed the spooky-themed October issue. The combination of Día de los Muertos, ghost towns, and haunted places, all mingled with the occasional tie-in to the local cemetery, gave me goosebumps. Even though I don’t believe in the “spiritualism” behind the Day of the Dead, I am a very avid proponent of honoring those who have gone on before me. This passion of remembrance led me to a very eccentric hobby of taphophilia, a strong interest in funerals, graveyards, and cemeteries. All of this led to the Find A Grave website, which, I believe, would assist those who are deeply involved with Día de los Muertos. Most cemeteries are logged on the website, and most have a historical profile attached. What an excellent 21st-century way of never…

DRIVE 20 MINUTES southwest from the cypress canopied bayous of Caddo Lake and you’ll arrive in Marshall, a quintessential small town steeped in musical history. The town was founded in 1841, and the Texas and Pacific Railway arrived 30 years later, quickly becoming one of the area’s largest employers. Then Wiley University, the first historically Black college west of the Mississippi River, was established in 1873. Marshall is known as the birthplace of boogie-woogie music, a style originated by African Americans in the late 1800s as they worked in logging camps and on the railroad. They turned to the piano to create a new sound influenced by rhythmic railroad reverberations, including a primary bass line called “The Marshall.” These days, there are new restaurants, breweries, boutiques, and hotels opening up…

A SATURDAY STROLL down Sealy Street in Galveston’s historical East End is a sensory feast. Sweet-smelling magnolia, oleander, and palm trees exude an Old South ambiance, as do the roots of the giant oaks that burst through sidewalk cracks. Seagulls and salty air remind visitors the Gulf of Mexico is only a few blocks away. But the stars of the show in the East End are the historical Victorians, colorful two-story grande dames of the late 1800s with wraparound porches, turrets, and floor-to-ceiling windows. These Victorians, built with 19th-century craftsmanship, sturdy cedar windows, and long-leaf pine, are survivors. They predate the Hurricane of 1900, which washed away much of the island and is still the most fatal natural disaster in U.S. history. To walk among them is to time travel…

SPEND SOME TIME among the second-story galleries of Fort Worth’s Kimbell Museum and it becomes clear why architecture fans across the world gush about the building. Designed by architect Louis Kahn in 1972, its slender skylights encased in vaulted concrete barrels filter light throughout the galleries while the simple travertine walls showcase the European and Ancient masterpieces that hang upon them. With clean lines, materials like glass and concrete, and design that prioritizes purpose over showy aesthetics, the Kimbell offers its visitors the best of modernism, an architectural design most prominent in Texas between 1930 and 1990. After oil money began flowing and the state emerged as a major economic and political force, the newly wealthy hired the world’s most acclaimed modernist architects to lift their cities’ cultural cachet, building…

CICADAS ARE TRILLing in the scorching June air, and heat waves bounce off the Plano pavement like a desert mirage, but inside the ancient Forman House is a more magical time and season. A display of Christmas ornaments twinkles in the foyer, pinecone-studded garland snakes up a wooden stairwell, and jolly nisse—bearded gnome-like spirits from Nordic folklore bearing ski poles and pointed red hats—line shelves. “I can never take any of this décor down,” says Wooden Spoon owner Gwen Workman, “because we Scandinavians celebrate Christmas year-round.” For 37 years, this specialty shop for all things Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, and Icelandic has been a beacon for holiday cheer, as well as a global destination for Scandinavians in search of the rarest delicacies. In a refrigerated case is pungent Danbo cheese…

AS I WALK from the parking garage to the entrance of the San Antonio Central Library, the first thing I notice is how the bright Texas sun casts geometric shadows across every enchilada-red surface. The building, designed by Mexico City architect Ricardo Legorreta, reflects the bold shapes and colors evocative of the 1980s and ’90s. The library’s vibrant exterior continues inside, where a multistory yellow atrium is crowned by Dale Chihuly’s Fiesta Tower sculpture. On the first floor, there’s a dedicated art gallery that features rotating exhibitions by local artists, along with several sculptures and a mural by San Antonio’s Jesse Treviño. Now celebrating its 30th anniversary, the library is undergoing renovations to add another gallery and upgrade the Texana/Genealogy Department vault, which houses local historical archives. As part of…

WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, El Paso was the place stories came from. Stories of my dad and his cousins sneaking across the border to Juárez, Mexico, to watch bullfights; the one about my great-aunt Luz, who sawed the cast off her broken leg so she could attend a high school dance; the bit about the flooded yard and the plague of rashes. These stories had a biblical quality and a bigness to them, with brave characters, dramatic punishments, and outrageous gestures. I imagined them happening in a setting defined by the heat of the summer, the clear light of winter, the bare granite of the mountains, and the endless desert. All of this was different from where I lived as a kid in Salinas, California, a temperate place where…

IN WARMER MONTHS, the interior courtyard of San Antonio’s McNay Museum, with its lily pad fountain, talavera tiles, and shade trees, is a cool oasis. The building drips with details typical of colonial Mexico: wrought-iron railings that curve along staircases to second-story loggias, textured stucco walls, and red clay roof tiles. Designed by architect Atlee Ayres—the Texas state architect from 1914 to 1917—in the late 1920s, the museum is the former home of art collector Marion Koogler McNay, some-times called the Gertrude Stein of San Antonio. According to Kenneth Hafertepe, a cultural historian and professor at Baylor University, “the McNay is the greatest hit of Texas’ Spanish Colonial Revival style.” In the 1920s, a broad regional Spanish Colonial movement boomed throughout the sunbelt states that had once been part of…

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GROWING UP OUTSIDE of Washington, D.C., Art Director Sara D’Eugenio developed an appreciation for brutalist architecture. The minimalist aesthetic influenced her photography as she sought to capture the way the sunlight interacts with the structures, creating sharp shadows. Her favorite example of brutalism is Chinese American architect I.M. Pei’s Dallas City Hall, completed in the late ’70s. “Its 34-degree inverted pyramid design is a bit disorienting when you stand underneath and look up,” she says, “since instead of the building’s perspective getting smaller, it gets wider.” D’Eugenio’s love of symmetry in architecture informs her graphic design, too. She and the Texas Highways design team nod to the art form throughout the issue. For “By Design,” a survey of five prominent architectural styles found in Texas, D’Eugenio emulates the grid structure…

HIGH ATOP A sand dune in Port Aransas, a small white sanctuary overlooks the ocean. Completed in 1938, the Chapel on the Dunes is the oldest continuously functioning church on Mustang Island. Standing tall, even through hurricanes, for over eight decades, it has become a symbol of strength and longevity in the coastal community. The idea for the 250-square-foot chapel was conceived by San Antonio native Aline B. Carter, a renaissance woman whose interests included natural sciences and the arts. Another San Antonio artisan, Ethel Wilson Harris, oversaw its construction. The Carter family and the Port Aransas Historical Museum continue to care for the sanctuary, painting, making repairs, and restoring the windows and door to their original 1930s design. After Carter died in 1972, Austin-based artist John Patrick Cobb was…

ON A RECENT visit to the Little Chapel in-the-Woods, a small modernist sanctuary on the leafy campus of Texas Woman’s University in Denton, I run my fingers along the smooth oak of the pews. Sitting among them, I have a clear view of the chapel’s graceful brick arches and 11 striking stained-glass windows showing women at work in science, social service, and the arts. Designed by Texas architect O’Neil Ford in the late 1930s, the building was constructed in collaboration with the young men of the Works Progress Administration and the 300-plus women undergraduate students who carved its wooden pews and designed the glowing windows. Pausing for a moment to study their work, it’s hard not to feel a touch of awe. You don’t have to be wellversed in architecture…

UPON ENTERING CASTROVILLE’S limestone Biry House, now known as the Castro Colonies Living History Center, the smell of cypress floods the nose. It seems impossible that the original ceiling boards, installed in the mid-1800s, could still smell so fresh generations after the first wave of Alsatian immigrants hammered them into place. “Remember, the Alsatians didn’t trim up the boards. That’s called a living edge,” says Phil King, a board member and museum chairman at the history center, as he points out the rough cypress that frames this home. It’s considered one of the best preserved This self-guided examples of the state’s vernacular pioneer architecture. Spend time with architecture aficionados, and it’s likely the word “vernacular” will get tossed around. The Castroville settlers, like most home builders throughout history, built “in…

ON MY FIRST TRIP TO FAR WEST TEXAS, many Decembers ago, I stayed at a roadside motel outside Terlingua in the Chihuahuan Desert. I was eager to take in the landscape, but, arriving very late, I had to wait until morning. Looking outside my window at first light, fog covered the earth like a blanket, as though the yuccas were just waking up, too. I replay the memory often, the pleasantly spartan room mirroring the rich coldness of the desert outside. There’s a particularity to encounters at a good roadside motel. My affection for the roadside motel is not out of a nostalgia for some bygone version of America. Rather, I seek out spaces in this country where you can feel in the middle of things instead of apart and…

AT NONNO’S FAMILY Pizza Tavern in Houston’s Montrose neighborhood, stained-glass Pizza Hut Tiffany-style lamps dangle from the ceiling, and once-treasured Troll dolls sit atop vintage Sansui speakers blaring hits by Janet Jackson and the Cars. A tabletop Pac-Man game is stationed near the bar, and midcentury rattan chairs and lime green Naugahyde booths comprise the seating inside the dining room. Taking in the whole tableau, you’d be forgiven if Sara and Martin Stayer’s heralded concept, named “Pizza Joint of the Year” by Esquire in 2023, brought to mind visions of macramé and chintz curtains. Inspired by the Malörtdrenched neighborhood spots Sara frequented while growing up in the North Side of Chicago, the Stayers strove to create a similar kind of unaffected, family-friendly restaurant serving cracker-thin tavern-style pizza. And, according to Sara,…