Five Texas Courthouses, 2026

Posted on March 19, 2026 by admin

The first time I remember making my mother laugh was in the courthouse square in Denton, Texas, seat of Denton County. Kids make their parents laugh sometimes, unless the parent is completely sour on life, and then woe be to the child. We’d gotten out of church one Sunday noonish when I was maybe six. After church, it was our habit to drive over to the courthouse square to visit a small store for sodas and snacks. A highlight of the day, as you’d think. I remember the long outline of that store, and the rows of candy I explored.

The streets were crowded, maybe more than usual, and it probably meant that we, my mother that is, temporarily couldn’t find for a parking space. “The Baptists must have just gotten out of church,” she said, referring maybe to a specific church, or to the fact that many Baptists tended to be out and about on Sunday, this being Texas. (Quotes are reconstructions, because of course.)

“Do they know we’re Episcopalians?” I said.

That day or any other that I saw it in the mid-1960s, the Denton County Courthouse was a hulking presence, the focus of attention for blocks around, and, for a young kid, a mysterious place. Obviously an important place, but what goes on inside?

Last month, now in my own mid-60s of age and armed with a somewhat better knowledge of civics, I stopped to take a look at 10 or more county courthouses in Texas along the routes of my travels.

Anderson County. Palestine, Texas.

Bastrop County. Bastrop, Texas.

Bell County, Belton, Texas.

Caldwell County. Lockhart, Texas.

Erath County. Stephenville, Texas.

Sometimes I could get in, sometimes the building was closed. With one or two exceptions, I managed to walk all the way around the courthouses. There’s a niche travel blog for you (and I’m not the man to do it): circumambulate all 254 Texas county courthouses. Why? Because they’re there.

Oakwood Cemetery, Huntsville

Posted on March 18, 2026 by admin

Sometimes the right word just comes to you: tatterdemalion. As in, the tatterdemalion historic Oakwood Cemetery in Huntsville, Texas, or at least the older section of it.

I use that word with great affection for tatterdemalion cemeteries – ragged and dilapidated, the ragamuffins of the cemetery world, attracting even less attention than the big-deal Victorian cemeteries in the big cities. These cemeteries might be scruffy, but their repose is deep.

Oakwood does have Sam Houston, so people must come for him.

Oops.

You can part your car, walk a few seconds to Gen. Houston’s stone, pay your respects, and never enter the cemetery proper.

Too bad. The grounds extend along a long strip of land, generally sheltered by such pines as you find in the piney green East Texas, and sport a variety of stones, older and newer, moderately ornate and more modest.

Some smashed slowly by time. The fate of all, eventually.

Henderson King Yoakum (d. 1856) is here. He was on the ground floor when it came to writing Texas history, authoring a two-volume work titled History of Texas from Its First Settlement in 1685 to Its Annexation to the United States in 1846 in 1846. His is the taller of the two obelisks.

Off in a corner of the older section – which is the sector near Houston – are simple crosses.

They tell a story. Actually, no. A sign nearby does. It’s worth reading in its entirety.

A related story, about the yellow fever epidemic of 1867.

To summarize, in case the text in the photo is hard to read: a lot of Huntsville residents died that year from yellow fever, though not Gen. Houston, who was already dead. Wonder whether any Huntsville physicians or other men of science died persuaded that miasma did them in.

Oak Grove Cemetery, Nacogdoches

Posted on March 17, 2026 by admin

Houston’s Glenwood Cemetery sprawls out near downtown, adjacent to much of the parkland along Buffalo Bayou. In Nacogdoches, Oak Grove Cemetery is a more modest burial ground. Nacogdoches is a more modest city. The entrance to Oak Grove is about a half block from the Main St., but the grounds are still tucked away in a residential neighborhood along Lanana St.

Decent flora, but not a garden cemetery.

It’s an old cemetery by modern Texas standards – the first burial was the year after independence – so the cemetery punches above its weight in one way: noted early Texans. Such as Harden Edwards.

The state saw fit, during the 1936 Centennial, to put up a new stone for Edwards, an empresario and “Leader of the Freedonian Rebellion,” who must have penned the rousing tune, “Hail, Hail Freedonia,” for future generations to enjoy.

The stone of a great-great granddaughter of Edwards who died in 1963 seems eager to bask in his remote glory. Why not?

One of the cemetery’s four signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence (60 men in total signed it).

A big name around here: Thomas J. Rusk.

He was a signer, fought at San Jacinto, and had a notable career in antebellum Texas and U.S. politics. There’s is a town a county over from Nacogdoches named Rusk, seat of Cherokee County. Also, strangely, a font based on his handwriting was created in our time, “Texas Hero.”

Some regular folks.

I don’t know how ordinary this person was, but perhaps he was gifted with Victorian prolixity. Or maybe his family was.

Brick tombs of the kind I’ve seen elsewhere in the South from roughly the same period, that is, sometime in the 19th century.

Adjacent to the cemetery but not associated with it is the former home of Zion Hill Baptist Church, one of the oldest African-American Baptist congregations in Texas, founded in 1878. The church is on the corner of Lanana and the delightfully named Bois d’arc St., as in lumpy “apples.”

The congregation hasn’t used the structure, designed in 1914 by architect Diedrich Rulfs, for nearly 40 years. It’s a fine little museum these days, restored to its early 20th century glory.

Rulfs was a German who made good in Texas, as so many have, within a very special niche: most of the buildings worth seeing in Nacogdoches are his work.

Glenwood Cemetery, Houston

Posted on March 16, 2026 by admin

Another in the very large file of Things You Don’t See Everywhere.

Go to a Texas cemetery of any size and of an older vintage, and you might well see one. While in Houston, I made my way to the Glenwood Cemetery, which isn’t far from downtown.

Expansive, slightly rolling but also partly hilly, and chock-a-block with stones for the departed.

Pretty lush in the spring or summer, but earth tones take over for the winter. Glenwood Cemetery is Houston’s rural cemetery movement cemetery, opening in 1871 and since becoming the permanent residence of citizens of the Republic, but also assorted mayors, governors, business men and other Houston notables, including those with the scratch for some sizable memorials. Some monumental.

Others more artistic.

Goyen is an angel, looking rather not like one you might see on a Hallmark card. Below, looks like St. Michael body-stomping Satan.

A large section of the cemetery, among the hills, uses artful bricks and intricate layouts and other features to convey old money – as old as Houston’s going to get, anyway, so we’re not talking about the Rothschilds.

All very nice, but it’s good not to overlook more ordinary folk.

Including the usual sort of sad memorials you always find.

Well worn by time, but you can tell it memorializes a child.

Animated Big Boy

Posted on March 15, 2026 by admin

Busy day, for-pay work to be done. Good day to stay home anyway, since rain has been falling in thick waves. Snow expected on Monday, followed by a winter-like cold snap for a day or two. Bah.

On Friday, on a whim, I used an AI program to animate one of the Big Boy statues I saw last month. A modest ad for the museum.

I created a new You Tube channel for it, It’s AI, But It Ain’t Slop, which is a motto we can call rally around. I’m starting to suspect that much AI animation looks like it does not only because of the technology’s inherent limitations, but also because of unimaginative prompts. Just a hunch.

Anyway, in roughly 48 hours, the thing has gotten more than 1,000 views, along with three likes and a dislike, but no comments. That isn’t many views in the grand scheme of YouTube, and only about a quarter of that total watched all the way through, but I’m tickled all the same. My postings over the years have been desultory, and none has gotten more than a few dozen views, if that. Give the people what they want, I guess, such as talking Big Boys.

Inn at the Art Center Bed & Breakfast

Posted on March 12, 2026 by admin

It’s Burl Ives. It has to be.

Not quite as sure about this one.

I thought of Ed Wynn, but his glasses tended to be round, if Google images is to be believed. I asked AI for some suggestions about which famed entertainer was known for his oval-rimmed glasses, and it returned the following suggestions from most to least likely: Harold Lloyd, Peter Lorre and Buddy Hackett. Not sure “Buddy Hackett” in this context is an AI hallucination. Just a lousy opinion. Maybe there’s no single inspiration anyway.

Which came first, the chicken or the art center? There’s a definite answer to that, the chicken. Lots of chickens.

By the early 1970s, a sizable chicken farm in San Angelo, Texas, had run its course, and artists took to the task of redeveloping the place into the Old Chicken Farm Art Center. Fifty-plus years is a long time, but if you wander around the property in the morning sun, as Yuriko and I did, you’ll get a sense of the old chicken haunts.

No mere coops, but a poultry complex of an earlier time. I’m sure it was made obsolete by larger facilities and automation. These days, most of the spaces are art studios.

Because I can, I checked the numbers for chicken production in Tom Green County, of which San Angelo is the seat. Relatively few chickens, turns out: $220,000 in chicken sales in 2022, compared to $54.7 million in cattle sales for the county. Sounds like that might be a single chicken farm out somewhere from town. The town chickens, you might say, long ago flew the coop.

Being an art complex, there’s a lot of art and other objects on display, besides the wooden faces.

Being fairly early still on Monday morning, most of the studios weren’t open yet – they would be in the afternoon, when were already on the road to Marathon. We’d passed the night at the Inn at the Art Center Bed & Breakfast, in a room that opens onto a breezeway.

Artists had clearly been turned loose to design the rooms. Much to the better, I’d say. Ours was a two-bedroom unit with the sheen of an upmarket forest lodge, but without a particularly high price.

Unique woodwork for the walls.

Floor designs that I’ll take for unique.

In our time, you don’t even need hallucinogens to ramp up some trippy floor action.

All you need is a basic AI image generator, while you remain sober as a judge.

Roadside America Museum, Hillsboro, Texas

Posted on March 11, 2026 by admin

This clown in your nightmare. What did he look like again?

Right, Jack from Jack In the Box fame. Old Jack, that is, maybe from the early days of the fast-food chain in the ’50s and ’60s. Has that tired mid-century look because the mid-century was quite a while ago now. On the whole, even later versions of the clown has been retired.

I was fully awake when I encountered Jack, an artifact at Roadside America Museum, Hillsboro, Texas, a wall-to-wall gathering of American roadside advertising, or at least items that were pretty close to the roads – a sign or novelty item or product you might see at a gas station or a diner or a bar or a small grocery store or any such mid-century service business for a nation newly on the road, and with great gusto. Items large and small.

Located on a modest street of Hillsboro, a town between DFW and Waco. Jay and I arrived around mid-day on February 23.

Jack is around, but there are also Big Boys in quantity and variety. If I were that first one, I’d watch out for the criminal element from McDonaldland, standing right behind him trying not to look suspicious. Sure, he’s a burglar, but he might be a pickpocket or even a stickup man, too.

Betty Boop. From a slightly earlier time, but still pulling her weight as a carhop.

Mr. Peanut. Didn’t something happen to him? Died of a busted goober?

Esso. I’m barely old enough to remember the Exxon brand consolidation. (Mad magazine parodied that as “Nixxon: Still the Same Old Gas.”)

Who is this? Why does anthropomorphic hot dog man, though the liberal application of condiments, encourage larger creatures to take a bite out of his head, indeed consume him as completely as unfortunate extras in Jurassic Park movies?

Admittance to Roadside America – no relation to the web site and (former?) book series of that name that I know of – is by making a phone call outside its door. The proprietor, one Carroll Estes, comes to the door, invites you in, and shows you around the place, pointing out things and sometimes recalling the acquisition of this or that, or letting you know how rare or not certain items are. An affable old fellow, grizzled if ever anyone was, probably in his 70s. So the commercial memorabilia all around us was no memorabilia when he was a lad, but part of the lay of the land. I came along in time to see some of those ads or at least characters myself, though they were fading.

He said he was particularly fond of Grapette items. Once he pointed that out, I started seeing them everywhere.

Been a long time since I had a passing thought about Grapette soda. It was available in north Texas in the mid-60s, and I’m sure I had more than a few Grapette bottle caps, once upon a time. I don’t remember its sister sodas, Orangette and Lemonette. According to Wiki at least, Grapette still exists as a house brand in Walmart’s beverage stable, and is popular even yet in Latin America.

I don’t remember O-So Grape.

Originated in Chicago and, like so many, has been revived at premium prices, which seems to go against the spirit of soda water you bought for coins in your misspent youth, but never mind.

A Dallas-area mid-century beverage, apparently.

There was much more. Mr. Estis has a sizable classic car collection in another part of the building, a much larger structure that had some industrial use at one time. He showed us around. He’d restored many of them himself, but he said he doesn’t do that as much anymore. He had some great ones, too. Wish I’d taken notes. But I was in the moment.

Even in the moment, you don’t notice everything. Especially at a chock-a-block place like Roadside America, where curios compete for your attention like a gaggle of souvenir-wallas in Delhi. It wasn’t until I looked at this picture that I noticed Wile E. Coyote sitting at the diner booth.

Stands to reason that Wile E. would patronize the few diners on the desert roads he haunts. He never managed to make a decent meal of the Roadrunner.

A Short Visit to the Chinati Foundation

Posted on March 10, 2026 by admin

Rain. All the way from Illinois to Texas. We got mighty bouts of it that had died down ’round midnight. As if to remind me, about time I’m home. Huh?

Come to Marfa for the West Texas art city vibe, stay for the concrete structures. Even if they are off in the distance, at least from the parking lot.

How to think of the untitled works by Donald Judd (d. 1994) on the grounds of the Chinati Foundation in Marfa? Brutalism in a brutal environment? Man’s – that is Humanity’s – longing for angular order in world of irregularity? The strange coprolite of giant angular creatures barely known to paleontology?

I could go on like that all day. Yuriko and I arrived at Chinati early in the warm afternoon of February 18. I can’t say we weren’t warned. The foundation’s web site says: “Our collection is installed across 21 buildings and two off-site locations; additionally, three works are site-specific, outdoor installations. Guided tours are the only way to see the majority of Chinati’s collection and grounds. Purchase your tickets in advance; tours often sell out.”

As we told a volunteer behind the desk, we didn’t have time for a tour. What to see on one’s on?

A long line of concrete structures in the West Texas scrub, that’s what. No tour guide, just a wander among the structures. But not inside them, according to instructions that we did follow.

After a little wandering, I came to think it isn’t just the structures, but the shadows too. What is it that the shadow knows? Right, the evil that lurks in the hearts of men.

I could turn on the art-speak spigot to describe Chinati (one of those infinite AI spigots, I figure), but no. I will note the tumbleweeds we saw.

A little less permanent than the Judd works, but only a little.

Big Sam

Posted on March 9, 2026 by admin

Approach Huntsville, Texas, from the south on I-45, and you can’t miss Sam Houston. Big Sam.

The largest soap carving in the world until the city of Qufu (曲阜) in southwestern Shandong province put up one of Confucius that is 18.5 inches taller, from pedestal to top of the head.

That only goes to show that you don’t need AI to make stuff up. Sam Houston isn’t made of soap, naturally, but something a little more durable, concrete and steel, and towers 67 feet from the plinth — he must have a dandy view of the Interstate. It’s been up only since 1994, the work of Huntsville native David Adickes. As for Qufu, there are surely statues of Confucius there, but I don’t feel like looking them up.

Naturally I followed the signs to the statue’s parking lot, got out and looked around.

My priority afterward was lunch, and I happened on Mr. Hamburger there in the heart of Huntsville, a few miles from Big Sam.

Not in the original location that opened nearby in 1959, I later found out, but in a redeveloped gas station. The original mascot, looking a little tired after decades in the Texas weather, had been moved inside to greet customers as they go to the bathroom.

All that wouldn’t be noteworthy if the place hadn’t delivered the goods, but it did.

Thus fortified, I found my way to the Sam Houston Memorial Museum, which is on the campus of Sam Houston Institute of Technology.

Old joke: Sam Houston State University. Not a large museum, but a nice collection of artifacts.

None better than Santa Anna’s silver chamber pot, a spoil of war at San Jacinto that the Mexican government probably has never wanted back.

Besides the museum building, the grounds sport a small open-air museum. Including a log cabin (not Houston’s) from the Huntsville area, from around the time of the Republic.

A log cabin that was Houston’s. He used it for his law office.

The earlier of the two Houston homes in Huntsville.

The later of the two, Steamboat House. The nickname fits. Houston, relieved of the governorship due to his belief that Texas was making a mistake in leaving the Union, died there in ’63.

The grounds has a water feature. With water fowl and cypress knobs.

Elsewhere, some land fowl.

A touch of authenticity, since the Houstons must surely have had chickens around.

The National Museum of Funeral History

Posted on March 8, 2026 by admin

One place I didn’t go in February was Ghana, the west African nation. If I had to pick a place to visit in that part of the world, I might well pick Ghana, for various reasons. One is that the coffin shopping is unlike anywhere else.

Rather, I stopped by the National Museum of Funeral History in northern Houston, which has a connection to Ghana. I was expecting a display of coffins maybe, but the museum has so much more: many hearses, horse-drawn and automobiles; items from the funerals of U.S. presidents and popes, including a large display about the funeral of President George Bush the elder; entire sections on cremation and embalming from the earliest times to now; Victorian death memorabilia in its macabre (to us) variety; a Day of the Dead exhibit; and, to my surprise, Ghanaian coffins, which the museum calls the largest such collection outside west Africa.

My favorite, though it’s a hard choice: the Duracell coffin, with its distinct copper top. Guess those batteries are sold in west Africa. You’d think Energizer would be the better choice.

The museum, founded in 1993, occupies more than 30,000 square feet in an unassuming building in a neighborhood of unassuming buildings. Had it not been for the billboard advertising it on the highway into Houston, I might have missed it. Or not. I have a way of ferreting out smaller museums. One important advantage of the NMFH: it’s open on Mondays. Many Houston museums are closed on Mondays and Tuesdays — the two days I was in town.

As with many specialized museums, NMFH is the legacy of a single person with a driving interest in a single subject and, in his case, access to many of the relevant artifacts. The subject just happens to be death adjacent, so when I mention the museum, people get a little weird.

“The idea for the Museum grew from Robert L. Waltrip’s 25-year dream of establishing an institution to educate the public and preserve the heritage of death care,” the museum says. Waltrip, a Houston mortician born to an undertaker father, didn’t need death care himself until recently, dying in 2023 at 92.

The hearse collection is impressive, making the museum count as a carriage and auto museum. Not all automotive hearses, at least in earlier times, looked like the stretch postwar hearses one thinks of now.

A vehicle the likes of which I’d never seen: a 1921 Rockfalls Hearse, built in Sterling, Illinois, the museum says. The hearse’s hand-carved body is composed of six types of wood.

Some horse-drawn hearses.

A children’s hearse from, of course, Victorian times.

Some coffins and caskets, too. “It’s not the cough/that carries you off/but the coffin/they carry you off in.”

Including an oddity known as the Money Casket, which is on loan to the museum, and was never meant to be put into the ground.

A section about presidential funerals. I spent a while there.

Prominent is a replica of President Lincoln’s casket.

There was a model of Lincoln’s funeral car, probably the most famous such in American history.

Other methods for carrying Lincoln when he wasn’t on the train.

Other presidential funerals got their due, such as those of Washington, Grant, Garfield, McKinley, TR, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford and as mentioned, an entire small room about the elder Bush. He had a funeral train as well, though relatively modest: from Spring to College Station, all within east Texas.