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Features
The dramatically beautiful hills that surround Wimberley are doubly responsible for the creekside village’s charm. For while they provide a scenic backdrop and a remarkable vantage point for lovers of scenery today, they provided for decades an almost impenetrable shield from advancing civilization. The seclusion and slow progress that resulted can be largely credited for Wimberley’s “antique” small-town charm.
Some type of mobile kitchens probably existed before the Civil War, but it is a Texas rancher named Charles Goodnight who is credited with inventing the chuckwagon in 1866 for use on the long cattle drives that became the backbone of the Texas economy after the war. "Chuck" was a slang term for food, and chuckwagon food included items that were easy to preserve, such as salted meats, coffee, beans, and sourdough biscuits.
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How often do you see a Ferrari in a small Texas town? I’d have to say hardly ever, but J. Katherine McClure claims that when she lived in the tiny north Texas town of Justin (population around 700), the dozen or so Ferraris in her shop made it the town with the most Ferraris per capita in the U.S. Old-timers would chide her gently, saying “You can’t haul much hay in one of those.”
It’s quite a rare occurrence for someone born in Ohio to be honored for “keeping Texas Texan,” but trick-roper Kevin Fitzpatrick had an advantage over most Ohioans. His parents were from Texas, and his dad, a former employee of the Dixie Dude Ranch in Bandera, was a horse-shoer by trade who just happened to be working at a race track in Ohio when Kevin was born. “When I was a kid,” he recalls, “my favorite toy was an old, worn-out rope.” It was a sign of good things to come.
In the early days of San Saba’s history, the abundant water resources were simply a matter of survival The Colorado and San Saba Rivers, along with wonderful springs just east of the town square, provided water for drinking, washing and irrigating the fertile valley fields. It didn’t take long, as the city began to grow, for some of San Saba’s more inventive minds to come up with more ways to take advantage of this great natural blessing.
For many Americans born after World War II, memories of five-star general Douglas MacArthur consist of the famous “I shall return” promise to the Philippines and Jimmy Webb’s song, “MacArthur Park” (made famous by Richard Harris).
It’s a little different in Brownwood, Texas, where Howard Payne University offers a multi-disciplinary Honors program called the Douglas MacArthur Academy of Freedom.
The little town of Leander, Texas, was only 26 years old when Anna Ray (Craven) Borho was born, and she has personally witnessed more than three-quarters of the now-booming city’s history. And since age 15, she has been a mainstay of the historic Leander Presbyterian Church, playing the piano almost every Sunday for more than eighty-five years!