Texas Then & Now

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In 1980, four young Austin entrepreneurs pooled about forty five thousand dollars, most of it borrowed from friends and ...
08/26/2026

In 1980, four young Austin entrepreneurs pooled about forty five thousand dollars, most of it borrowed from friends and family, and opened a single natural foods store called Whole Foods Market. 🌱

John Mackey and Renee Lawson Hardy had already been running a small vegetarian food store called SaferWay out of a converted house near the University of Texas campus, and when they merged it with another local natural foods store, Clarksville Natural Grocery, the combined operation opened as the first Whole Foods Market on North Lamar Boulevard. The original store was small by today's standards, with bulk bins of grains and produce, and a staff that numbered fewer than twenty people. Just seven months after opening, a massive flood tore through the store and caused significant damage, and neighbors and customers reportedly showed up to help the young owners dig out and reopen within weeks.

That single Austin storefront grew into a national grocery chain with hundreds of locations, eventually acquired by Amazon in 2017 for well over ten billion dollars, but it all started with a handful of people in Austin betting that Texans would want fresher, more natural food options. The original North Lamar location is long gone, replaced decades ago by newer stores, but the company still headquarters in the city where it began.

Did you ever shop at an early Whole Foods location, and how different did it feel from grocery stores today?



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There has been a gathering place on the same patch of East Austin land since 1871, long before anyone called it a music ...
08/26/2026

There has been a gathering place on the same patch of East Austin land since 1871, long before anyone called it a music venue. 🎸

The property that is now known as the Scoot Inn started out as a beer garden built to serve German and other European immigrant families who settled in East Austin in the years after the Civil War, a shaded outdoor spot with long tables where neighbors could gather on a Sunday afternoon. Over the following century and a half, the space changed names and purposes more than once, but it kept doing roughly the same job: giving Austin a place to eat, drink, and hear live music outdoors under the oak trees. By the time it became the Scoot Inn decades later, it had already outlasted most of the buildings that once surrounded it.

Today it is one of the oldest continuously operating outdoor venues in the state, still hosting bands under strings of lights and still built around the same simple idea that got it started a century and a half ago, people gathering outside to hear music together. The neighborhood around it has transformed completely, but the venue itself has quietly held on through all of it.

If you have caught a show at the Scoot Inn, what is the one performance that stuck with you?



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On March 19, 1840, a meeting meant to negotiate peace between the Republic of Texas and the Comanche ended in one of the...
08/26/2026

On March 19, 1840, a meeting meant to negotiate peace between the Republic of Texas and the Comanche ended in one of the bloodiest single afternoons in San Antonio's history. ⚔️

Comanche leaders had come to the old council house on Main Plaza expecting to negotiate the release of captives and discuss a lasting peace, bringing with them a handful of captives, including a young woman named Matilda Lockhart, as a gesture of good faith. When Texian officials realized the Comanche had not brought all the captives they were holding, tensions in the room turned to accusations, and a Comanche chief reportedly tried to flee through a door where armed Texian soldiers were stationed outside. Within minutes, gunfire broke out both inside the council house and across the plaza, and by the time it ended, dozens of Comanche men, women, and children, along with several Texians, were dead.

The Council House Fight shattered any chance of a negotiated peace between Texas and the Comanche for a generation, and Comanche raids intensified across the frontier in the months that followed as word of the killings spread. It remains one of the most consequential and least remembered events of the early Republic, a single afternoon in a San Antonio plaza that changed the course of Texas history for decades.

Why do you think an event this significant gets so little attention compared to battles like San Jacinto or the Alamo?



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Every April since 1948, the small town of Poteet, Texas has crowned a Strawberry Queen and thrown a festival that draws ...
08/26/2026

Every April since 1948, the small town of Poteet, Texas has crowned a Strawberry Queen and thrown a festival that draws well over a hundred thousand people to a town of about three thousand. 🍓

Poteet sits in the sandy loam country south of San Antonio, soil that turned out to be almost perfectly suited for growing strawberries once local farmers started experimenting with the crop in the early twentieth century. By the 1940s, Poteet strawberries had built enough of a reputation that local growers and business owners decided to throw a festival to celebrate the harvest, and the very first Poteet Strawberry Festival kicked off in 1948 with a parade, a queen's contest, and crates of berries sold right off the backs of trucks.

Nearly eighty years later, the festival is still going, still centered on the same fields and the same families who have been farming strawberries in Atascosa County for generations. It has grown into one of the most attended festivals in the state, but at its core it is still a small farm town showing off what its soil can grow, one crate of ruby red strawberries at a time.

Have you ever made the trip out to Poteet for the festival, and if so, what do you remember most?



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Before it was a beach town full of condos and fudge shops, Port Aransas was a working fishing village that most of Texas...
08/26/2026

Before it was a beach town full of condos and fudge shops, Port Aransas was a working fishing village that most of Texas had never heard of. 🎣

Founded in the 1850s as a small settlement near the pass connecting the Gulf of Mexico to Corpus Christi Bay, Port Aransas spent its first several decades as a quiet harbor for shrimpers and commercial fishermen, with a scattering of wooden homes and docks along Mustang Island. The town's fortunes shifted in the twentieth century as anglers discovered the world class tarpon and redfish waters offshore, and word spread that this sleepy island outpost had some of the best fishing on the Gulf Coast. By the 1930s, wealthy sportsmen were chartering boats out of Port A, and the sh*****ng fleet that once defined the local economy slowly shared the harbor with a growing tourism trade.

Today the beaches are lined with high rise rentals and the ferry line backs up for miles on a summer weekend, a version of Port Aransas that the original sh*****ng families from a century ago would barely recognize. Some of that old fishing culture survives in the shrimp boats still docked along the channel, but the sleepy island outpost has become one of the busiest beach destinations in the state.

If you have family who fished commercially out of Port A, what do they remember about the town before tourism took over?



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On July 19, 1878, a twenty seven year old outlaw named Sam Bass rode into Round Rock, Texas to rob a bank, and he never ...
08/26/2026

On July 19, 1878, a twenty seven year old outlaw named Sam Bass rode into Round Rock, Texas to rob a bank, and he never rode back out. 🤠

Bass had spent the previous year robbing stagecoaches and trains across North Texas with a small gang, and by the summer of 1878 the Texas Rangers were closing in. What Bass did not know was that one of his own men, Jim Murphy, had already cut a deal with the Rangers to save himself, and had tipped them off about the planned robbery in Round Rock. When Bass and two other men walked toward a store on the town's main street to scout the bank next door, a deputy grew suspicious, and a gunfight broke out that left one deputy dead and Bass mortally wounded.

He was captured the next morning hiding in a pasture outside town and died two days later, on his twenty seventh birthday, without ever giving up the location of any money he had stolen. Round Rock still marks the spot where it happened, and the story has become one of those pieces of Texas folklore that gets passed down more through legend than through textbooks, the doomed outlaw who kept his silence to the end.

What do you think made Sam Bass such a lasting legend compared to so many other outlaws of that era?



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Ninety three million years ago, a massive sauropod walked through soft limestone mud near what is now Glen Rose, Texas, ...
08/26/2026

Ninety three million years ago, a massive sauropod walked through soft limestone mud near what is now Glen Rose, Texas, and left a footprint that is still there today. 🦕

The Paluxy River cuts through Dinosaur Valley State Park, and when the water runs low during a hot Texas summer, the riverbed reveals rows of dinosaur tracks pressed into the rock so clearly you can count the toes. Paleontologists have been studying this site since the 1930s, when local fossil hunter Roland T. Bird first documented the trackway and shipped a section of it off to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Families have been wading out into that same river ever since, kids splashing right through footprints that were made before Texas was even land connected to the rest of North America.

What gets me every time is how ordinary the setting feels. It is just a shallow river with cypress trees and a few picnic tables, and then you look down and you are standing in the exact spot where something enormous walked before there were any humans anywhere on Earth to see it. The park has had to fight erosion, flooding, and decades of foot traffic to keep the tracks legible, and rangers now rope off the most fragile sections to protect them for whoever comes next.

Have you ever been to Dinosaur Valley, and if so, do you remember which trackway you saw first?



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Fairmount was one of Fort Worth's most desirable neighborhoods when it was built in the early 1900s, then it spent decad...
08/26/2026

Fairmount was one of Fort Worth's most desirable neighborhoods when it was built in the early 1900s, then it spent decades sliding into decline before anyone thought to save it. 🏡

Developed starting around 1907 just south of downtown, Fairmount filled up with Craftsman bungalows and Victorian style homes built for the city's growing middle class, full of front porches designed for actually sitting outside and knowing your neighbors. By the mid twentieth century, like a lot of close in urban neighborhoods across Texas, it had fallen out of fashion, with absentee landlords and deferred maintenance chipping away at the housing stock.

Starting in the 1980s, a wave of preservation minded residents began buying up and restoring the old homes one at a time, and Fairmount is now one of the largest historic districts in Texas, still full of the same porches, just with a lot more fresh paint than it had a few decades ago.

Does your city have a neighborhood that almost got lost before people decided to save it?



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Flaco Jimenez picked up his father's accordion as a kid in San Antonio's Westside and ended up carrying conjunto music t...
08/26/2026

Flaco Jimenez picked up his father's accordion as a kid in San Antonio's Westside and ended up carrying conjunto music to places it had never been before. 🥁

Born Leonardo Jimenez in 1939, Flaco grew up steeped in the sound his father Santiago had helped pioneer decades earlier, and he pushed it even further, blending traditional conjunto with rock, country, and Tejano influences over a career that spanned more than six decades. He recorded and toured with artists as far outside the genre as the Rolling Stones, Dwight Yoakam, and Bob Dylan, all while staying rooted in the same button accordion style that defined South Texas dance halls generations earlier.

Flaco won multiple Grammy Awards over his career and became one of the most recognized ambassadors conjunto music ever had, introducing an entire international audience to a sound that started in small South Texas dance halls and never really left home, even as it traveled the world.

Did you grow up listening to Flaco Jimenez, or did you discover him later?



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08/26/2026

The Ellis County Courthouse in Waxahachie has faces carved into its stone towers, and more than a century later, locals still argue about who they really belong to. 🏛️

Built in 1897 out of pink granite and pink sandstone, the courthouse rises above the town square in a wild mix of turrets, arches, and towers unlike any other courthouse in Texas. Local legend says a stonemason working on the building carved the faces of local women into the exterior stone, and when one of them turned down his affections, he supposedly recarved her face into something far less flattering. Historians have never been able to fully confirm the story, but the carvings themselves are very real.

Visitors still walk the square today trying to spot the face that supposedly started the legend, and the building remains one of the most photographed courthouses in the entire state. Standing in front of it, the square still looks remarkably close to how it appears in postcards from a hundred years ago. 📸

Which carved face do you think is hiding the real story?



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