Galveston to Quanah on Texas Highway 6

A secret garden, a drive-through feedstore, presidential papers, tasty pinto beans—and a Picasso.

by Paul Burka

May 2002

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A more localized type of politics has affected the next part of the drive. In early Texas, Stephen F. Austin and Sterling Clack Robertson feuded over the land between Bryan and Waco; Robertson eventually won, but only a county name marks his memory. More recently, a battle has raged over whether Highway 6 or the roughly parallel Texas Highway 36 should become a major traffic artery. Highway 6 has prevailed, but not every town along the way is celebrating. Residents of Hearne and Calvert oppose a planned bypass that would shift traffic away from the antiques shops and galleries along the current highway. The situation is particularly acute in Calvert, where the brickwork in old buildings that sit a few feet from the roadway is degenerating, shaken by heavy truck traffic. The argument in town is whether to save the buildings or save the businesses.

I heard about this dilemma at Mojoe's Coffee Cart, on the sidewalk in front of a store called Rustique, an eclectic place filled with antique bicycles and handcrafted furniture. The owners, Brent and Gena Cain, told me that the name of the cart has a double meaning: In addition to "more joe," it refers to the gruesome story of Calvert's most infamous resident. Back in the twenties, a drifter died when he fell off a train passing through town. A local funeral home used so much embalming fluid that the then-unnamed corpse became mummified before it could be buried. Locals called it Mojo, a name that stuck. The body was kept at the funeral home, where it remains to this day.

After driving through the historic residential district, built around a cemetery and still looking like something out the twenties, I was feeling the pull of the West—open roads and open skies. I drove through Marlin, looking for a sign of the glory days, when its mineral baths made it a major attraction, but there was scant evidence to find. I moved on, to Waco and beyond. For the rest of the way to Oklahoma, almost four hundred miles, I did not see a McDonald's, a national chain motel, or a town with more than four thousand people. In choosing where to eat or bed down for the night, just follow the old rule: You pays your money and you takes your chances.

It is hard for towns to survive out here, for the old ways of making a living, oil and agriculture, are playing out, and new ways are hard to come by. Clifton, 47 miles beyond Waco, is doing better than most. Once a college town before its Lutheran school closed in the fifties (and, long before that, the focus of Norwegian settlement in Texas), it has been reborn as a center for Western art; the old main building of the college is now the Bosque Conservatory. Two members of the Cowboy Artists of America reside here, Bruce Greene and Martin Grelle, and five other well-known Western artists have had ties to Clifton; together they are referred to locally as the Bosque Seven. Greene's life-size bronze of a cowboy astride a horse drinking water is located on the way into downtown.

After hundreds of miles of gently rolling countryside, the twelve-mile stretch between Clifton and Meridian was a welcome piece of Hill Country, with characteristic limestone bluffs. I was so glad to see hills that I took the three-mile side trip to Meridian State Park, which is famous among birders as prime golden-cheeked warbler habitat. (May is the ideal month to visit.) The park road goes around a small lake, winding through low hills and thick, thick stands of cedar. I found a picnic table and finished off a hefty sausage sandwich from Bunkhouse Bar-B-Que in Clifton. Afterward, I returned to Meridian and drove into town, drawn by a handsome limestone courthouse that is the domain of the Word family, one of the oldest small-town political dynasties in Texas. It has produced four generations of county judges—five if Cole Word wins the general election in November.

Traffic was light now, and I rolled through farm country: dairies, pecans, peanuts. I stopped in Hico (with a long i) to check out the town's two claims to fame, the pies at the Koffee Kup cafe and a deceased resident known as Brushy Bill, who insisted that he was really Billy the Kid and had some documentation to prove it. Stop in at the Billy the Kid Museum and you might be persuaded. In Dublin, who could resist the opportunity to have a fountain Dr Pepper, using the original recipe, at the Dr Pepper Bottling Museum, the company's first bottling plant? Not I. And, yes, it does taste different, smoothing out the acidic sharpness of modern soft drinks. Eastland is the home of Old Rip, a horned toad who was placed in the cornerstone of the old courthouse in 1897 and was found to be alive and slumbering like Van Winkle (Old Rip—get it?) when the courthouse was demolished 31 years later. After his death, Old Rip was embalmed and placed in a teeny open coffin in a display window of the new courthouse. Albany merited a longer visit. Its Old Jail Art Center has one of the finest collections in rural America, including works by Renoir, Klee, Modigliani, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Matisse. The Nail family established the museum and donated several collections. The former family home is now a bed-and-breakfast on the square, the Ole Nail House.

After Albany there would be no more stops. The road turned north beyond Stamford and headed for the Red River and Oklahoma, still a hundred miles away. Now the country was unmistakably the West—brush instead of trees, rolling ranchland, an occasional mesa, and always, sweeping vistas, a dome of sky, and low lines of hills far in the distance. I watched a storm move over the horizon, with great streaks of horizontal lightning scrawling their signatures across the sky. It was completely exhilarating to be out here, so far from anything, without a home or a business along the roadside to fill even a fraction of the emptiness. Beyond Knox City, Highway 6 crossed the Brazos and climbed out of its watershed for the first time since the route began. Instantly the landscape changed again, to red-dirt badlands with striped bands of gray and white showing on the exposed bluffs: Red River country. Daylight was fading to dusk by the time I reached Quanah, named for a famous Comanche chief, so I kept going, heading for the river. Its wide bed, which had the distinctive color of the badlands, contained only a trickle of water. Somewhere in that little stream, I like to think, was a grain of dirt that would be washed down the river. Perhaps one day it would reach the Gulf of Mexico and, maybe, end up on the beach at Galveston, completing the loop I had begun.

Directory:

Billy the Kid Museum, 105 N Pecan, Hico; 254-796-4004; $3, students $2, children 12 and under free

Bosque Conservatory of Fine Art, 1701 W Ninth, Clifton; 254-675-3724; closed Sun

Bunkhouse Bar-B-Que, 1003 S Avenue G, Clifton; 254-675-8409; closed Sun evening and Mon

CowTalk Steakhouse, 7846 Texas Hwy 90 South, Navasota; 936-825-6993; lunch Tues through Sat, dinner Sat; no credit cards

D&D, 33402 Hempstead Hwy, Hockley; 281-401-6006 or toll-free 888-869-6202

Dublin Dr Pepper Bottling Museum, 221 S Patrick, Dublin; 254-445-3939 or toll-free 888-398-1024; $2, children 6 to 12 $1, under 6 free

Fanthorp Inn State Historic Site, south end of Main, Anderson; 936-873-2633; tours Sat and Sun; $3, students $1.50, children 5 and under free

George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, 1000 George Bush Dr, College Station; 979-260-9552; $5, senior citizens and students $4, children 6 and under free

Joe's Barbeque, 1400 Texas Hwy 6 East, Alvin; 281-331-9626

Koffee Kup Family Restaurant, Texas Hwy 6 and US 281, Hico; 254-796-4839; no credit cards

Meridian State Park, Texas Hwy 22 at Park Rd 7; 254-435-2536; $3, senior citizens $2, children 12 and under free

Nolan Ryan Foundation and Exhibit Center, 2925 S Bypass 35, Alvin; 281-388-1135; closed Sun; $5, senior citizens and students $2.50, children 6 and under free

Old Jail Art Center, 201 S Second, Albany; 915-762-2269; closed Mon

Ole Nail House, 351 S Third, Albany; 800-245-5163; rooms $70 and $75

Peckerwood Garden Conservation Foundation, 20571 FM 359, Hempstead; 979-826-6363; for hours, go to peckerwoodgarden.com; $5, students and children 12 and under free

Rustique and Mojoe's Coffee Cart, 600 E Main, Calvert; 979-364-2449; closed Tues and Wed

Washington-on-the-Brazos State Historical Park (from Navasota, take Texas Hwy 105 West for seven miles and turn on FM 1155); 936-878-2214; $4, students $2

Wood Factory, 111-113 Railroad, Navasota; 936-825-7233; open daily, by appointment Sat and Sun

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