When automobile travel was a new thrill and tourist courts were all the rage, roadside parks sprang up along every highway in Texas. These parks are usually elbow-shaped pullovers, with a few picnic tables, some trash cans, and no bathrooms. It is not unusual to find historical markers in such places. You can often see rock designs at pullovers as well, sometimes involving pretty big boulders that I guess were leftovers from road construction. Some have interesting fossils or other features that make me think someone found a neat rock and thought to haul it over for the roadside park. Beyond that, I believe there is more history than we know there at many of them.
Johnny Kirklin of Bangs told me that when he was a boy, he and his grandad travelled out to West Texas to buy horses and sell them in Houston. His grandad was an old-time cowboy who went on many cattle drives and once rode in a posse after Pancho Villa. Johnny remembers roadside stops they made on these trips. “He had an old car,” Johnny said, “like a ‘56 old car, and he’d pull a two-horse trailer behind it. And when you go out in West Texas, used to be, still like that a little bit, there might be a big windmill or a rock reservoir right there next to the highway. We’d pull over, and he’d make coffee, maybe get some pork and beans, and he’d stake his horse out there, and he’d get water to that horse.”
When I was growing up in the Allegheny Mountains of Virginia, my dad knew all the roadside stops. Mostly they were at springs, places where travelers stopped for water rest, and to care for their animals. There wasn’t an Allsups every 20 miles. You couldn’t just stop for a soda or coffee on the way somewhere. Johnny remembers the same about the pullovers, that there was often a dipper at these places, chained near a spring or fresh source of water so that people could get a drink or to fill a container. These locations were a kind of public possession by common consent, as everyone travelling needed them to survive. I suspect that many of the old stops along early routes were simply converted into roadside pullovers when the State began a more formal construction project to create small public rest stops along highways in Texas.
Brown County has several of these facilities still in use, including one at Ben Lednicky Park in Brownwood, right beside Chick-fil-A. The Lednicky Park honors Brownwood resident Ben Lednicky, who played an important role in designing roadside parks and pullovers throughout Texas. It contains two historical markers, one noting the contributions of Lednicky to Texas roadside park development. It says, “Lednicky Park is named in honor of Ben Lednicky, for his work on the roadside parks of Texas. Lednicky began his career with the Texas Highway Department after graduating from Texas A&M University in 1937. His career was dedicated to the development, design and construction of roadside parks and vegetation management. One of the first landscape architects employed by TxDOT, Lednicky assisted in developing the standard for roadside parks, vegetation conservation and erosion control that is used today. Examples of his work can be seen in parks throughout Texas from the Big Bend to the Panhandle. Lednicky retired in 1976 after 39 years of meritorious service.”
Many break stations like those built by Lednicky were developed as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal venture, and were a project of the Works Progress Administration. They had a specific template for their design noted in a paper published by TxDOT as :”naturalistic”, thus the use of rock seen so often at these sites, and the similarities between these small parks and larger construction at State Parks. Lake Brownwood State Park is a good example of the development of these same principles, with numerous rock buildings and stone designs.
The Lednicky Park is interesting to me. It’s right beside the old dam on Pecan Bayou. I imagine workers who built the dam probably sat right there to take their breaks, but I doubt they were the first to do so. It might well have been an old crossing, maybe even a ferry of sorts for those looking to get across the bayou by horse-drawn wagon. Likely it was also a campsite for early travelers, a spot to wait out a flood before trying to get across, or to rest from the travails of dragging wagons, cattle and possessions across the stream. A lot of roadside pullovers in Texas are near water, or have an old public well nearby. There’s a story behind each one, although it might not be written down. Many of the stories might be far older than we imagine.
I never miss a chance to stop at these places. They’re not needed now like they were back when the highways were first being developed and car travel was considered an adventurous vacation in and of itself. Today it’s common to stop by one and find no one else there. I keep a lookout for the remnants of old wells, crumbling foundations, fence lines and large tree–things that hold clues that a pullover might be older than it appears. Most have no historical documentation, but that doesn’t mean there’s no history to be found!
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Diane Adams is a local journalist whose columns appear Thursdays on BrownwoodNews.com. Comments regarding her columns can be emailed to [email protected].
