Mexia, Texas

Everything Mexia is known for

2 songs mention this city 1 artist from here

Music in Mexia

Songs About Mexia

Mexia
Robyn Ludwick
80%
"TITLE"
Earle Byrd From Mexia
Muscadine Bloodline
77%
"Earle Byrd From Mexia"

Artists From Mexia

C
Cindy Walker
country Pop: 21

Rivers & Roads in Song near Mexia

Songs written about the waterways and highways that run near Mexia.

Interstate 45 7 songs Trinity River 10 songs Brazos River 37 songs Interstate 35 42 songs

Musical Heritage

Cindy Walker Days festival RoadyGoat

You may not know the name Cindy Walker, but you know her songs — and Mexia, Texas, sure knows her. She's the hometown songwriter, and now the town throws her a party. Cindy Walker Days: two days, kicking off the day after her birthday, split between the Mexia Civic Center and Old Fort Parker. A Mexia native, Lindsay Liepman, started the foundation behind it. And they didn't book small — the headliners are the Bellamy Brothers and Bob Wills' Texas Playboys, the western swing kings themselves, with Rick Trevino, Brennen Leigh, Hot Club of Cowtown, and twenty more filling out the bill. Saturday out at Old Fort Parker, they run an all-star tribute — everybody playing nothing but Cindy's songs. A whole town, singing back the woman who gave the world her words.

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Cindy Walker house and studio, South Brooks Street RoadyGoat

Down on South Brooks Street in Mexia, there's a house that was still holding songs nobody had ever heard. When the Cindy Walker Foundation bought the songwriter's old home and studio, they found close to seventy-five unpublished songs and demos inside — plus her awards and plaques stashed under the bed, and recordings of Walker telling her own life story in her own voice. A Mexia native named Lindsay Liepman started the foundation in 2022 to save the place, and she's turning it into a museum and a residency where songwriters can come and work. The restoration runs about three hundred thousand dollars, and the plan is almost too fitting: let the royalties on her songs pay to keep her house standing. The woman wrote the hits. Now the hits get to bring her home.

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Cindy Walker (songwriter) RoadyGoat

You know her songs even if you've never heard her name. Cindy Walker was born near Mart in 1917 and wrote her first tune, "Dusty Skies," at about twelve years old. As a young woman she talked her way into recording "Lone Star Trail" — pitched it to Bing Crosby himself on Sunset Boulevard, and Crosby cut it. That opened the door. Over sixty-plus years she wrote more than five hundred recorded songs: "You Don't Know Me," "Dream Baby," "Cherokee Maiden," "In the Misty Moonlight." Bob Wills, Roy Orbison, Ray Charles, Elvis — they all reached for her catalog. In 1953 she came home to Texas and settled in Mexia, near her family, and kept writing. Willie Nelson put out a whole tribute album, "The Songs of Cindy Walker," in 2006 — released just days before she died.

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The Mexia House That Was a Hidden Hit Factory RoadyGoat

On a quiet street in this small town stood one of country music's most unlikely engines. Songwriter Cindy Walker came home to Mexia in the 1950s and lived here for more than half a century, far from Nashville or Hollywood. From that ordinary house she wrote songs cut by Ray Charles, Roy Orbison, Bob Wills, Elvis Presley, Bing Crosby, Willie Nelson, and many more, including "You Don't Know Me," "Dream Baby," "Cherokee Maiden," and "Blue Canadian Rockies." Music stars reportedly rolled up to her modest Mexia home in tour buses and private cars. Walker stayed so unpretentious that some of her major honors were found stored under her bed instead of hung on the walls. After the Cindy Walker Foundation acquired the deteriorating house, workers turned up recordings, sheet music, and personal artifacts inside, and the building is now undergoing preservation. It's the perfect place to remember that countless people know her songs by heart without ever knowing her name. A Country Music Hall of Fame catalog was written here, in plain sight, in a town most travelers blow right past. (Source: Country Music Hall of Fame; Texas State Historical Association.)

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Cindy Walker Days, the Town's Songwriter Festival RoadyGoat

Every summer, Mexia throws a party for its quiet musical giant. Cindy Walker Days is an annual music and songwriter festival held near Walker's July birthday, spread across Mexia and the nearby town of Wortham, celebrating the Country Music Hall of Fame songwriter who lived and wrote here for more than fifty years. It's a fitting tribute, because Walker's legacy gave this small town a live-music and songwriter identity far bigger than its size would suggest. For a place most travelers know only as a name on a highway sign, the festival is a chance to hear the songs born in those Mexia rooms played out loud, and to understand why a town this size cultivates such a serious music scene. If you're rolling through in mid-July, it's worth checking whether the festival is on, because there are few better places to hear a Cindy Walker composition than the town where she actually wrote it. (Source: City of Mexia; Cindy Walker Foundation.)

History of Mexia

Mexia, TX RoadyGoat

Mexia sits on a bit of high ground, a subtle rise breaking up the long, flat stretch of the Blackland Prairie. That little bit of elevation makes a difference. You can feel it in the air, a slight breeze that might miss the lower-lying areas. Richland Creek meanders nearby, its waters eventually finding their way into the Trinity, a slow, steady pulse that has shaped the land for centuries. This land, so good for agriculture, has always been the lifeblood here. You can see it in the fields that stretch out in every direction, a patchwork quilt of green and gold depending on the season. Then came the oil. Suddenly, the quiet fields were dotted with derricks, and the population exploded. It changed everything, bringing a rush of people and money that transformed the town. That boom eventually faded, but left its mark. The feeling that remains is one of quiet resilience, a sense of holding on to the land and the community that defines it. It's a place where the past is always present, a reminder of both the boom and bust, the rich soil and the steady flow of Richland Creek.

The Boom That Brought Martial Law to Mexia RoadyGoat

The quiet farm town around you exploded almost overnight. After the Mexia Gas and Oil Company drilled ten dry holes and finally struck gas on its eleventh try, the real transformation came on November 25, 1920, when wildcatter A. E. "Colonel" Humphreys completed an oil producer roughly 3,100 feet beneath the L. W. Rogers farm. A second Humphreys well in the summer of 1921 reportedly flowed about 4,000 barrels a day, and the rush was on. Mexia's population is said to have leapt from 3,482 to nearly 35,000 as drilling crews, speculators, gamblers, and liquor sellers swamped the place. Roughly 300 wells produced more than five million barrels in January 1922 alone. It got so lawless that on January 12, 1922, Governor Pat Neff placed parts of Limestone and Freestone counties under martial law to fight robberies, gambling, and bootlegging. One prized well plunged from 16,000 barrels on January 1 to 10,000 just two days later, an early sign the field was being drained far too fast. For a brief, frantic stretch, this farming community was one of the wildest oil towns in Texas. (Source: Texas State Historical Association.)

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The Cannon Buried Beneath a Buggy House RoadyGoat

At the bend where Jack's Creek meets the Navasota River sits the Confederate Reunion Grounds, where Limestone County veterans began gathering every year in 1888. Families came by buggy and special train from Dallas and Houston, often timing the reunion for a full moon, and crowds sometimes reached 7,000 for brass bands, speeches, dancing, and vendors selling "Hokey Pokey" ice cream at five cents a slice. The strangest relic here is Old Val Verde, a Union cannon captured by Confederate forces at Mansfield, Louisiana, in 1864. Rather than surrender it after the war, Captain T. D. Nettles buried it beneath a buggy house near Fairfield. It was later dug up and ceremonially fired at dawn and dusk during the reunions, and it remains on display at the site. When the oil boom hit, the grounds changed again: Pure Oil Company built recreation buildings and a pump house with a 55,000-barrel standpipe to supply its drilling, and that pump house still holds a large Cooper-Bessemer engine and industrial pump. One spot layers Indigenous history, Civil War memory, Victorian recreation, and petroleum engineering. (Source: Texas State Historical Association; Texas Historical Commission.)

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Reiter, Wilhelm Arthur

1920

Wilhelm Arthur “Bill” Reiter, geologist whose expertise and persistence brought in the Mexia Oil Field, was born at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on September 21, 1886. He was the son of William Theodore Reiter and Carrie L. (Putnam) Reiter. His grandfather, Conrad Reiter, had been an oil wildcatter in the dawn days of the U. S. oil business in Pennsylvania and inspired Reiter to seek a career in oil. After his father’s death, Wilhelm moved with his mother to a farm in western Kentucky. In 1910 Reiter earned a degree as a mining engineer at Kentucky State University, where he met F. Julius Fohs, nationally-known petroleum engineer. From 1909 to 1916 Reiter worked for the U. S. Geological Survey before he became one of Fohs’s stable of bright, college-educated young geologists in Tulsa, Oklahoma. After service in the United States Army during World War I , Reiter returned to Tulsa. On April 1, 1919, he reported to the Corsicana-Mexia region of Texas on instructions from Fohs to hunt for oil in existing natural gas fields. Although his boss became discouraged about prospects and ordered him to another site, Reiter was so sure that there was oil in Limestone County that he arranged financing himself and insisted that the discovery well be drilled. He was amply vindicated when Roger No. 1 blew in on November 19, 1920, setting off the incredible Mexia oil boom and opening up a field which was to produce more than 100 million barrels. The Mexia Field was pivotal in the history of Texas oil as the first fault-line oil reservoir and the first to exploit the rich Woodbine Sand ( see WOODBINE FAULT-LINE FIELDS ), which later produced millions of barrels of crude from all over the eastern half of the state, including the great East Texas Oil Field , the field that won World War II . In 1922 Reiter married Minnie Lucille Denning of Mexia, who had had the honor of driving the stake for Rogers No. 1. The same year he left the Fohs organization to join with a fellow geologist, William Henry Foster , to form Foster-Reiter Consulting Geologists and the Reiter Oil Corporation. These successful companies evolved into the Reiter-Foster Oil Corporation with offices in Tulsa, Dallas (where Reiter made his home and had offices in the Magnolia Building), and New York. He sold his interest in the corporation in early 1929. In 1936 Reiter moved to Houston to resume work for the Julius Fohs organization. During 1946 he worked geology for the Sinclair Oil Company in Panama and returned to set up business for himself as an independent in Houston. Some of his important later discoveries were the Reiter Field in Freestone County in 1949, the Reiter North Field in Navarro County in 1951, the Coit Field in Limestone County in 1952, the Cistern North Field in Fayette and Bastrop counties in 1964, and the Mary Macha Gas Field in Wharton County in 1958. All three of his sons—William Jr., Putnam K., and Jesse Oscar—became active in the oil business. Putnam K., who later became Judge P. K. Reiter of Houston, said that his father discovered more oil after the age of sixty-five then before it, in spite of his early successes. Reiter died in Mexia on April 13, 1974. He was buried in Mexia City Cemetery.

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Mexia - Oil, Vice, and the Rangers

1920

The 1920 oil strike near Mexia brought 30,000 people to a town of 4,000. The resulting lawlessness, bootlegging, and vice led Governor Pat Neff to declare martial law in 1922.

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Steel, Alfonso

1836

He was severely wounded in the Battle of San Jacinto and its last survivor. Erected by the State of Texas, 1962

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Mexia Oil Boom

1912

One of great free-wheeling oil booms of America before proration was enforced. Population in Mexia increased from 4,000 to 50,000 within days after oil discovery in 1920 at Rogers No. 1 Well, located 1.6 miles west of this marker, just off FM Road 1633 Earlier (in 1912), Blake Smith and other Mexia men had brought in a gas field. Believing oil also could be found here, they interested a veteran operator flamboyant wildcatter A. E. Humphreys-- who struck oil at 3,105 feet. By May 1912 gushers were flowing. Humphreys had 2,000 men; did a $4,000,000 business. His fortune later was estimated at $37,000,000. The boom was on. Other companies were formed. A second renowned wildcatter, J. K. Hughes, shared the leadership in developing the field to capacity. Millionaires, merchants, celebrities, operators and workers swarmed to Mexia for a share in the "Black Gold." Many undesirables came also, and one day were ousted by the thousands by Texas Rangers. In 1920-1921 first boom year, $5,000,000 went into construction; tanks for over 30 million barrels of oil were built; but even so storage area was inadequate for output. A park and clubhouse developed near this site by Col. Humphreys-- mementos of boom-- are still in use. 1967

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Hord, Thomas Alan

1876

Thomas Alan Hord, early town marshal, cotton buyer, and land developer, was born on March 10, 1841, in Obion County, Tennessee, the son of Judge William H. and Mary Jane (Crockett) Hord . His family moved to Texas in January 1845 and settled near the site of Dallas. At that time there were fewer than twenty people in the area. When he was nine, Hord trapped and killed a bear on the wooded banks of Cedar Creek. After attending the school his mother had opened in Dallas, Hord went back to Tennessee to study at Cumberland Law School in Lebanon. In 1861, when the Civil War broke out, he returned to Dallas and enlisted in the First Texas Battery of Dallas and Tyler (Good-Douglas Battery). He served in the unit throughout the war and saw action on both sides of the Mississippi. After the war Hord became a land developer and cotton buyer. He lived in Port Sullivan, Bryan, and Calvert in the late 1860s and early 1870s. At the request of the townspeople of Mexia in 1876, he became town marshal; he survived several shootouts and was a "terror to outlaws" until 1889. On September 23, 1887, Hord married Katherine Caldwell of Danville, Kentucky, with whom he had two children. He moved to Dallas in 1891 after a brief stay in Rockport and helped to develop Oak Cliff. He was active in community affairs and was one of the founding members of the Oak Cliff Presbyterian Church. Hord died in Dallas on October 28, 1914, and is buried in the Oak Cliff Cemetery.

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Things to Do in Mexia

day trip
Day Trip to Mexia 🎶 FULL EPISODE (S15 E10)

Featured on The Daytripper — a full-episode local travel guide.

Everything Near Mexia

283 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.

Explore Mexia on the Map
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