Pearland, Texas

A terrible storm ravaged Pearland in 1915. Among the important structures it destroyed was the town's high school. For the next 22 years, Pearland teenagers traveled to Webster to attend classes. The long commute…

Named for the Polish nobleman who came to Brazoria County in the late 1880s and fell in love with the flowering pear trees in an area he called Pearland, Zychlinski Park was included in the original town site. Captain…

You're driving past the First United Methodist Church of Pearland. Methodists have been gathering here since 1894, but this specific congregation officially formed in 1898 as the Methodist Episcopal Church. Their first…

You're in Pearland, so here's the pear tangent preserved in the town's name: the railroad community first had the post-office name Mark Belt. In November eighteen ninety three it became Pearland because pear trees were…

You're in Pearland, so here's the pear tangent preserved in the town's name: many European pears are harvested mature but firm and finish ripening off the tree. Left hanging until the flesh feels soft, some varieties…

You're in Pearland, so here's the pear tangent preserved in the town's name: pear trees open white spring blossoms that must be pollinated before fruit develops. Many cultivars produce poorly with their own pollen and…

You're in Pearland, so here's the pear tangent preserved in the town's name: the slightly sandy texture of pear flesh comes from sclereids, commonly called stone cells. These cells develop thick, hardened walls and…

You're in Pearland, so here's the pear tangent preserved in the town's name: perry is fermented pear juice, related to cider but built around pear varieties selected for tannin, acidity, sugar, and aroma rather than…

You're in Pearland, so here's the pear tangent preserved in the town's name: British and Commonwealth English uses gone pear-shaped for a plan that has failed, though the phrase's exact origin is disputed. Pear-shaped…

ROBERT LEE HUNTER AND JULIA IVA MARTIN HAD ROOTS IN PEARLAND AS EARLY AS THE 1890s WHEN THE AREA WAS KNOWN AS MARK BELT. ROBERT LEE HUNTER WAS BORN TO JOSEPHINE BONAPARTE ESTES AND THOMAS JOHNSON HUNTER ON NOVEMBER 16,…

Ronnie Killen trained as a classical chef, cooked in fine dining kitchens, and then did something nobody expected — he opened a BBQ joint in Pearland, Texas in 2013. Within a year, Texas Monthly named it one of the best…

Galveston Avenue runs along the eastern edge of Pearland's original townsite, a grid laid out in 1894 by Count Witold von Zychlinski, a Polish nobleman who bought the surrounding prairie and platted a town of about 520…

As you drive along Highway 288, look to the west. If you see a vast expanse of homes, lakes, and shopping centers, you’re looking at the reason for modern Pearland. This is Shadow Creek Ranch. In the mid-1990s, this was…

The name Pearland is a tribute to a dream that the weather took away. The post office here opened in 1893 as Mark Belt and was renamed that November for the pear trees standing all around it, and developers sold the…

Pearland got its name from a Polish nobleman and a stand of fruit trees. The place began as a siding switch on the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway back in 1882, and when a post office opened in 1893 it was called…

You're driving past the Old Settlers Cemetery, the final resting place for many of Pearland's earliest residents. The town itself got its start in 1894, named for the pear orchards that flourished here. But the first…

Old Alvin Road is exactly what its name says: the older surface road that links Pearland to the town of Alvin, a few miles south. Both towns were born from the same railroad. In 1883 the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe…

Farm to Market Road Five Eighteen in Pearland, between State Highway Thirty Five and Sunset Meadows Drive, is the Officer Endy Ekpanya Memorial Highway. Endy Ekpanya moved to the United States from Nigeria with his…

John Lizer Road in Pearland carries the name of one of the town's early settlers. According to the Pearland Historical Society, John Lizer arrived in September 1910, lured like many newcomers by newspaper ads that sold…

Pearland High School in Pearland, Texas qualified for the 2026 UIL state softball championships, reaching the state tournament (final four) in Class six A, Division One.

Long before the barbecue lines and the national fame, Ronnie Killen made his name in Pearland with a white-tablecloth steakhouse. Killen's Steakhouse, at 6425 West Broadway, grew out of his earlier Pearland barbecue…

You're driving through Pearland, a town that owes its very existence to a railroad line. Back in 1883, the Santa Fe Railroad built a simple siding switch called 'Mark Belt' right here. It wasn't much, but it was the…

Pearland is on State Highway 35 thirty-seven miles north of Angleton in northern Brazoria County. It became a siding switch on the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway in 1882. The community was first named Mark Belt,…

The very existence of Brookside Village is a lesson in hydrology. The town sits in the extreme north of Brazoria County on Clear Creek, the waterway that forms its northern border — and the Harris County line. A…

In the 1950s, Houston was a hungry giant, swallowing whole communities through annexation. Lots out here started selling mid-decade, and the new residents saw the writing on the wall. They sat in the far north corner of…

Dobie (Houston, TX) placed on the 6A Texas high school baseball stat leaderboards for the 2026 season: Maximilian Torres (0.410 avg).

Hastings Friendswood Road is a destination road named for its two endpoints, joining the old Hastings settlement out by Pearland with Friendswood to the southeast. Friendswood is the better documented of the pair, and…

Longview, Texas, sits right in the heart of East Texas, a place shaped by pine forests and the promise of black gold. In its early days, it was a simple market town, a place where farmers from the surrounding…

Mykawa Road and the little community along it are named for a Japanese rice farmer who barely got two years in Texas. Shinpei Mykawa, whose family name was really Maekawa, first reached the United States in 1904 as a…

State Highway Thirty Five in Harris County is the John B. Coleman Memorial Highway, named for a Houston doctor born and raised in the Third Ward. Doctor John Brady Coleman graduated from Jack Yates High School, Fisk…

Ross S. Sterling High School (11625 Martindale Rd., Houston, TX) — in HISD, not the like-named Baytown school — is where Clyde Drexler bloomed late. Born in New Orleans and raised in Houston, Drexler was cut from the…

Decades before any railroad or oil well, this was open coastal prairie laced with timber along the creeks, and it was the Booth family who put down the first roots. William Rufus Booth and his wife, Elizabeth Tursey…

Early Friends would not use the ordinary names of the days and months, because those names carry the old gods. Sunday became First Day, Monday Second Day, and the months were numbered rather than named. They called it…

The name does not point at the timber. Friendswood was founded in 1895 by Quakers, members of the Religious Society of Friends, who bought land at the headwaters of Clear Creek and recorded the name that July at the…

A Quaker meeting house has no altar, no steeple, and traditionally no paid minister. Early Friends called ordinary church buildings steeple-houses, a deliberately flat word, and gathered instead in silence to wait. That…

The neighborhood around you began in 1895 as a deliberate act of faith. A colony of Quakers, members of the Religious Society of Friends, had drifted down from Kansas and tried the high plains at Estacado, then gave up…

Before the subdivisions and the commuters, Friendswood ran on figs. Among the first Quaker settlers was Nereus Stout, a former Kansas farmer who became a respected horticulturist and is believed to be the first person…

Follow the same logic one more step and you get a quiet joke about geography. The Friends were plain-speech people who refused to swear oaths at all, on the grounds that a person's word should not come in two grades.…

The Friends did not pick their name to sound welcoming. It comes out of scripture, from the line in the gospel of John in which Jesus tells his followers he no longer calls them servants but friends. The Society of…

Friendswood (Friendswood, TX) placed on the 5A Texas high school baseball stat leaderboards for the 2026 season: Landon McGuire (3 HR); Caiden Wells (3 HR).

When the great Galveston hurricane roared inland on September 8, 1900, the deadliest natural disaster in American history, it leveled forests across this corner of Galveston County and demolished the little…

At 109 West Spreading Oaks stands the oldest building left from Friendswood's Quaker beginnings: the Perry House, completed by Nathan and Mary Perry in 1902. Like the town's Academy, some of its lumber came straight…

Friendswood does not look like a pageant town, which makes R'Bonney Gabriel's run all the more fun to tell. She grew up here, played high-school volleyball, and at 15 picked up sewing, falling in love with building…

Friendswood sits where four creeks drain toward the bay, the same waterways the Quakers prized for farmland, and in late August 2017 those creeks turned on the town. Hurricane Harvey stalled over the upper Texas coast…

Among the NASA people who settled in Friendswood when Johnson Space Center pulled the whole region into orbit, Stephen Bowen has one of the strangest career arcs in the astronaut corps. Born in 1964, Bowen was a U.S.…

Friendswood's fig boom hid a botanical problem that turned the whole town into a food-processing operation. A ripe Gulf Coast fig is essentially a bag of sugar and water with paper-thin skin; it bruises if you look at…

Friendswood wasn't always the comfortable suburb it is today. It began as a Quaker settlement in the late 19th century, a small pocket of faith and community carved out of the coastal prairie. The name itself,…

You're driving past the former home of Cecil and Frances Brown, a house that was once the only brick residence in Friendswood. Built in 1938, it was designed by architect Henry A. Stubee. Cecil Brown was a major player…

For more than 50 years the heart of Friendswood was a building made of disaster lumber, the storm-timber Academy where the Friends worshipped, taught school, and held town meetings. By the late 1940s the congregation,…

In July 1938, Houston-born Howard Hughes flew around the world in 91 hours, 3 days and 19 hours, with a crew of four, smashing the record. New York gave him a ticker-tape parade up Broadway on July 15; when he came…

You're driving past Friends Church Cemetery in Friendswood. This community was founded in 1895 by six families who left Estacado, seeking a new home honoring their Quaker faith. The earliest marked burial here is young…

If you want a Friendswood meal with some lineage behind it, Perry & Sons Market & Grille at 614 South Friendswood Drive is the call. The Perry family's restaurant story started in 1979 with a humble Houston-area meat…

You're driving through Friendswood, a community founded in 1895 by Quakers seeking a place to build their lives around faith and education. Their leaders, F. J. Brown and T. H. Lewis, bought the land and named it…

You're driving through Friendswood, a town founded by Quakers way back in 1895. But did you know this place became a fig-farming powerhouse? It all started with Nereus Stout, a Kansas farmer who became the first to grow…

You're driving through the Houston area, and right here is Friendswood. But this wasn't always a town. Back in 1895, a group of Quakers, known for their opposition to slavery, settled here. They bought over 1,500 acres…

Friendswood is an incorporated residential community on Farm Road 518 twenty-seven miles northwest of Galveston and twenty miles south of Houston in northwestern Galveston and southern Harris counties. The surrounding…

Imagine a town in coastal Texas where dancing, drinking, and card-playing were all forbidden. That was the reality of early Friendswood. Founded in 1895 by Quakers, the town was a 'holy experiment,' a planned community…

In August 2017, Friendswood became a case study in catastrophic hydrology. When Hurricane Harvey stalled, it dumped 56 inches of rain—the highest total anywhere in the region—directly on the Clear Creek watershed. A…

In 1960, Friendswood was a sleepy farm town with about 450 residents. By 1970, it was a bustling suburb with nearly 6,000. What happened? The space race. In 1961, NASA chose the Clear Lake area, just a few miles east of…

Before it was a suburb, Friendswood was fig country. The town was founded by English Quakers in the 1890s - that's where the name comes from, the Society of Friends - and by the 1910s and 20s they had found that this…

You're driving past Genoa United Methodist Church. GENOA UNITED METHODIST CHURCH IN 1894, FOURTEEN PEOPLE MET IN THE TOWNSHIP OF GENOA UNDER THE LEADERSHIP OF THE REV. J. R. MURRAY TO ORGANIZE THE COMMUNITY’S…

When South Houston High School opened its doors in the fall of nineteen fifty-eight, there was just one problem: the doors were not finished yet. The building was not done, so for the first several weeks about five…

Farm to Market Road Five Twenty Eight through Friendswood is the Ralph L. Lowe Parkway, and it is named for a man who pushed to get it built. Ralph Lowe built his first home in Friendswood in nineteen fifty two. It was…

On February 18, 1910, French aviator Louis Paulhan made the first documented heavier-than-air flight in Texas at 'Aviation Camp' in South Houston, in a Farman biplane held together by wooden struts and wire with a…

The Vanessa Guillen Memorial Highway, on State Highway Three in Harris County between Interstate Forty Five and Almeda Genoa Road, honors a soldier from Houston. Vanessa Guillen was one of five children, a natural born…

Shadow Creek High School (Alvin, TX): Most recent: 28-22 over Denton Ryan · 2019 5A Division 1 final.

You're driving past Manvel, Texas, right where Carl "Doc" Sprague was born. <break time="400ms"/> Back in 1925, Sprague, who worked as an athletic trainer at Texas A&M, wrote to Victor Records suggesting they record his…

Shadow Creek (Pearland, TX) placed on the 6A Texas high school baseball stat leaderboards for the 2026 season: Lubin Rincon (0.474 avg, 1 HR).

You're driving past the site of the Lubbock Ranch, home to a true Texas statesman, Francis Richard Lubbock. He arrived in Houston in 1837, and by 1846, he and his wife were living on this 1300-acre spread. Lubbock built…

Manvel is at the intersection of State highways 6 and 288 and Farm Road 1128, in northern Brazoria County. It was originally named Pomona; however, because there was already a town in West Texas called Pomona or Pamona,…

You're driving past Ellington Field, a place with a long history tied to American air power. It started way back in 1917, during World War I, as a response to a push from Houston's Chamber of Commerce. Named for Lt.…

You're in South Houston, which started life in 1907 under a different name: Dumont, platted by C.S. Woods of the Western Land Company along the Galveston, Houston and Henderson Railroad. The town incorporated as South…

You're near KIPP Sunnyside High School in Houston. Last December, they took down Dallas UME Prep sixty-one to eight to win the Texas 11-Man TCSAAL state football championship. They wear that crown until this December,…

In August of nineteen seventy-three, a seventeen-year-old named Elmer Wayne Henley shot and killed his thirty-three-year-old associate Dean Corll in a house in Pasadena and then called the police. What officers found…

South Houston was not just the place where Texas saw its first airplane fly. For a brief moment, it actually built them. When the Frenchman Louis Paulhan lifted off from a muddy field here in nineteen ten, in the very…

Before the refineries and freeways, the flat ground you're crossing was a farm town. South Houston's first economy ran on agriculture, with farmers growing strawberries, figs, and vegetables and loading the produce onto…

It's easy to assume South Houston is just the south side of Houston, but the building at 1018 Dallas Street proves otherwise. This is South Houston City Hall, the seat of a separate, roughly three-square-mile city that…

If you want a meal that connects you to old South Houston rather than the strip malls, City Cafe at 513 College Avenue is the one. The old-fashioned dining room has served Texas-style breakfasts and plate lunches since…

This patch of South Houston has worn a lot of grim hats. In nineteen-oh-eight, Doctor J.L. Dickerson opened the Asgard College for Girls in a two-story brick building here. It lasted about four years before a contract…

If you pass by Manvel High School, you're looking at the town's most famous institution. Not for academics. For football. The Manvel Mavericks are a Texas high school power, and the remarkable part is how fast it…

The highway you may be driving on, State Highway 288, is the single most important piece of engineering in Manvel's modern story. For years, it was a congested freeway that made commuting to Houston a daily struggle.…

South Houston started life under a different name entirely. When C. S. Woods of the Western Land Company laid out the townsite in 1907, he called it Dumont, and why he picked that name is anyone's guess. No record…

As you travel through Manvel, you'll cross creeks and bayous, most notably Chocolate Bayou. In August 2017, during Hurricane Harvey, these quiet waterways became raging rivers. Manvel’s location on the flat, low-lying…

As you travel through South Houston you're crossing a landscape shaped by a slow argument between water and land, and the key player here is Berry Bayou. This isn't just a creek — it's infrastructure. The ground is dead…

Manvel's transportation infrastructure is centered around Texas State Highway 6 and Texas State Highway 288. Highway 6 passes through the community, offering a direct route to Alvin, Galveston, and Sugar Land.…

You're driving through South Houston, a community that started life as Dumont in 1907. It was founded by C.S. Woods and quickly established a post office. But its early days were all about agriculture, with local…

Southeast of Manvel lies the ghost of an old boom. Two days before Christmas in 1934, Stanolind Oil and Gas — the Standard Oil outfit that would one day be Amoco — brought in a well called the Number One J. W. Surface,…

The flying machine Louis Paulhan brought to this prairie in 1910 was, for its moment, one of the most advanced devices on Earth, and it makes South Houston's best engineering story. His Farman biplane was a lightweight…

Next time you're rolling across south Houston, look down at that slow brown ribbon of water — that's Sims Bayou, and it's named for a guy who literally measured Texas with a chain. Bartlett Samuel Sims came down from…

You're driving past South Houston, and right here, on February 18th, 1910, Texas saw its very first airplane fly! <break time="400ms"/> French aviator Louis Paulhan, on a national tour, was hired by land promoters to…

Manvel (Manvel, TX) placed on the 6A Texas high school baseball stat leaderboards for the 2026 season: Christian Hamilton (5 HR).

At 3820 South Shaver Street sits South Houston High School, whose Hall of Honor tells you how much talent a small prairie town can produce. The wall recognizes graduates and community members whose careers span…

Pull off Highway 6 at 17119 and you can eat at what a barbecue magazine literally crowned the best chain in Texas. True Texas BBQ is run by the grocery giant H-E-B, and the idea of a supermarket smoking brisket might…

The town you're rolling through almost had a different name. When the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe ran its line through here in the late 1800s, the little railside settlement was first called Pomona. The trouble was that…

For a town this small, Manvel High School has thrown a staggering amount of talent onto the national stage, and the football story is almost hard to believe. Dual-threat quarterback D'Eriq King starred here, passing for…

Long before highways and rooftops, the soil here grew money in the form of strawberries. From the late 1800s into the early 1900s, the berry was Manvel's chief cash crop, and the work it demanded pulled whole families…

Early Manvel took a beating from the sky in just five years. First came snow in 1895, a genuine novelty on this stretch of Gulf Coast prairie. Then a tornado tore through in 1899. The worst arrived in 1900, the same…

For three-quarters of a century Manvel was a struggling farm community, knocked back by storms and never quite becoming the boomtown the railroad promoters had imagined. Then, on September 8, 1931, the Texas Company…

The toll lanes you can take north toward Houston are a quiet feat of highway engineering, and they begin right here in Manvel. The State Highway 288 express lanes start near County Road 58 and run roughly fifteen miles…

Telephone Road earns its plain-spoken name from the wires it once shadowed. In 1883 the Southwestern Telegraph and Telephone Company strung the state's first long-distance line, linking Houston with Galveston down on…

Genoa Red Bluff Road is another double-barreled name that maps an old route between two vanished settlements. On the inland end was Genoa, the town founded in eighteen ninety-two by J. H. Burnett, who insisted the…

Next time you're rolling across south Houston, look down at that slow brown ribbon of water — that's Sims Bayou, and it's named for a guy who literally measured Texas with a chain. Bartlett Samuel Sims came down from…

Evan E. Worthing High School (9215 Scott St., Houston, TX), in the Sunnyside neighborhood, is where Mike Singletary willed himself into a football player. The youngest of ten children of a Houston street preacher, he…

You're driving past the site of the First United Methodist Church of Pasadena. A Methodist society first formed nearby in 1896, and a congregation organized in Pasadena in 1898, meeting in the town's one-room…

Almeda-Genoa Road is a hyphenated name because it once literally tied two separate railroad villages together. On the west end sat Almeda, the town a Houston doctor named in the eighteen eighties for his daughter,…

Pine Gully is about as small as a named waterway gets — two miles, start to finish, entirely inside the Houston city limits. It rises near the old Park Place neighborhood southwest of the 610 Loop and runs east to Sims…

Jesse H. Jones High School (7414 Saint Lo Rd., Houston, TX; now Jones Futures Academy) is where Darrell Green's blazing speed first stood out — an All-State track athlete and All-City football player. He went to Texas…

Spencer Highway, the road running through South Houston, may owe part of its existence to circus elephants. One of the town's most colorful residents was circus proprietor George Washington Christy, nicknamed the Little…

Pershing Street in southeast Houston carries the name of General John Joseph Pershing (1860 to 1948), the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, the United States Army that fought in Europe during World War…

As you drive along NASA Parkway, you're on the central artery of the space race. Before 1961, this road was a quiet country lane through farm and rice land. When the Manned Spacecraft Center was built next door, Webster…

The rockets that went to the moon were an incredible feat of engineering, but the system that built them, right here on the ground, was just as complex. Webster became a crucial node in that system — though it didn't…

In 1961, a significant event in Webster's history occurred when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced that it was building the Manned Spacecraft Center (now known as the Johnson Space Center)…

Froberg's Farm is the place where Alvin's old fruit-boom identity is still alive and you can taste it. The Froberg family has farmed in the Alvin area since 1936, which ties the operation directly back to the era when…

Next time you're rolling across south Houston, look down at that slow brown ribbon of water — that's Sims Bayou, and it's named for a guy who literally measured Texas with a chain. Bartlett Samuel Sims came down from…

Try to picture this area without the highways and office buildings. In 1879 it was open coastal prairie, and a man named James W. Webster bought a huge tract of it to build a proper English farming village in Texas. He…

7717 Cullen Boulevard was the original home of Screwed Up Records & Tapes, the storefront DJ Screw (Robert Earl Davis Jr., born July 20, 1971 in Bastrop, Texas) opened in January 1998 because the lines of customers…

Drive near here and you're standing at the hinge of Texas history. In April 1836, Sam Houston's scout Erastus 'Deaf' Smith and a handful of riders galloped to the wooden bridge spanning this little bayou and tore into…

Space Center Boulevard runs through Clear Lake in southeastern Harris County, right beside the sprawling NASA complex that gave it the name. On September 19, 1961, NASA announced it would build its Manned Spacecraft…

State Highway Two Eighty Eight, from the Cleburne Street exit out to Beltway Eight, carries the name Barbara Jordan Memorial Parkway. Jordan was born in Houston in nineteen thirty six and grew up in the Fifth Ward.…

NASA Parkway is the name the Texas Legislature gave in two thousand three to NASA Road One, from State Highway One Forty Six to Interstate Forty Five, and to Farm to Market Road Five Twenty Eight from there to State…

You're driving through Houston, near where Edward Ruthven Taylor and Ann George built a life against the odds. Edward, born in 1845, fought for the Confederacy, was captured, and returned home sick with tuberculosis.…

Short as it is — barely five miles — Horsepen Bayou threads through some of the most futuristic real estate in Texas. It rises just north of Clear Lake City and NASA's Johnson Space Center, practically in the backyard…

You're driving past Almeda, a town that started with big dreams of citrus in the 1890s. Illinois investors bought this land near an old railroad line, hoping the mild Texas climate would make it a paradise for growing…

Pine Gully is about as small as a named waterway gets — two miles, start to finish, entirely inside the Houston city limits. It rises near the old Park Place neighborhood southwest of the 610 Loop and runs east to Sims…

On Spencer Highway in Pasadena stood Gilley's, the self-proclaimed (and Guinness-listed) world's largest honky-tonk. Club owner Sherwood Cryer rebranded his existing club around 1970-71 in partnership with singer Mickey…

Mickey Gilley grew up in Ferriday, Louisiana alongside his cousins Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Swaggart, and was the namesake headliner of Gilley's in Pasadena from the start; partner Sherwood Cryer insisted the club…

Right in the heart of Iowa Colony's biggest new community stands a remarkable piece of engineering: the sixty-foot Meridiana Tower, the tallest thing for miles. It isn't just a sculpture. It works as a sun tower — an…

Next time you're rolling across south Houston, look down at that slow brown ribbon of water — that's Sims Bayou, and it's named for a guy who literally measured Texas with a chain. Bartlett Samuel Sims came down from…

In the early 1900s these Brazoria County prairies were not about houses or Houston commuters. Iowa Colony itself was laid out in 1908 by the Immigration Land Company of Des Moines, and took its name from two Iowans, G.…

Many new subdivisions have a pool and a playground. Here in Iowa Colony, the 2,700-acre Meridiana community was built around a different idea: the neighborhood itself is a classroom. It is a partnership with Alvin ISD,…

Iowa Colony was founded in 1908 by the Emigration Land Company of Des Moines, Iowa. The community received a post office in 1919, and rice farming was introduced there in 1920. Although not directly on a railroad line,…

You are standing on the ground that was once Gilley's, billed as the world's largest honky-tonk. In the early 1970s a Pasadena businessman, Sherwood Cryer, took an old open-air beer joint he ran on Spencer Highway, a…

In 1980 this honky-tonk became a movie star. Paramount filmed Urban Cowboy right here inside the real Gilley's, with John Travolta as Bud, a country boy who comes to the Houston refineries for work, and Debra Winger as…

The star of Gilley's wasn't a person, it was a machine: the mechanical bull, nicknamed El Toro. Sherwood Cryer installed it in 1976, buying the idea from a New Mexico man who built the bucking machines to train rodeo…

The whole legend started not with a film but with a magazine. In September 1978 Esquire ran a story by Aaron Latham called The Ballad of the Urban Cowboy: America's Search for True Grit. Latham embedded at Gilley's and…

The Urban Cowboy soundtrack may have outshone the movie. The double album hit number three on the Billboard 200, topped the country chart, and went multi-platinum. Its breakout single was Johnny Lee's Lookin' for Love,…

The man whose name hung over the door, Mickey Gilley, was born in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1936 and raised in Ferriday, Louisiana, where he grew up alongside two famous cousins: the wild rock-and-roll piano man Jerry…

Gilley's ended the way a lot of partnerships do, in court. By the late 1980s Mickey Gilley had soured on how Cryer was running the place, accusing him of letting it rot and skimming the profits. A jury sided with…

Gilley's name was on the sign, but Sherwood Cryer was the engine. Born in Diboll, Texas, in 1927, Cryer came to Pasadena after the war, welded for Shell, and ran a string of icehouses and beer joints before he built…

For years the voice you heard at Gilley's when the headliner was on tour belonged to Johnny Lee, the club's resident singer. Lee, born John Lee Ham in Texas City in 1946, joined the band in 1968 and held the stage here…

The community you're passing on Farm Road 521 carries a name that traveled a long way to get here. Fresno sits on land that was patented back in 1824 and spent the 1800s ringed by cotton plantations in northeastern Fort…

Before this spot settled on the name Fresno, the post office here kept changing what it called itself. The first office in the immediate area opened as Malvern, running from late 1893 until 1897. A few years later a new…

Fresno spent most of the twentieth century as one of the smallest dots on the Fort Bend County map, and the railroad is a big part of why it survived at all. In 1914 the place had a telephone line, a general store, a…

Where Evergreen Road crosses Mustang Bayou near Fresno, the U.S. Geological Survey keeps a small streamgage doing a job that's harder than it looks. Cataloged as site 08077877, it watches a drainage area of just 5.64…

Tucked off FM 521 is a quiet old cemetery that has gone by several names, Arcola-Fresno, Fresno, and Riceton-Arcola, a small graveyard that has quietly outlasted every label the surrounding community tried on for size.…

The slow water threading the low ground around Fresno is Mustang Bayou, and it behaves nothing like a steady river. It rises just south of Missouri City in northeastern Fort Bend County and winds about forty-five miles…

You're driving past Magnolia Creek Cemetery, a resting place named for the nearby watercourse. Its story begins in 1855 with the Perkins and Coward families, who settled this area. The first person laid to rest here was…

In early 1990, 14-year-old Regina Kay Walters left Pasadena, Texas with her 18-year-old boyfriend Ricky Lee Jones, hitchhiking toward Mexico. The pair were picked up by long-haul truck driver Robert Ben Rhoades — a…

Drive near here and you're standing at the hinge of Texas history. In April 1836, Sam Houston's scout Erastus 'Deaf' Smith and a handful of riders galloped to the wooden bridge spanning this little bayou and tore into…

El Camino Real means "the royal road" in Spanish, and the name carries real history in Texas. But honesty first: the famous colonial Camino Real, the old King's Highway also called the Old San Antonio Road, ran far to…

Pasadena felt Harvey's wrath like a personal blow. The bayous and drainage ditches that once whispered of rice paddies and alligator sightings swelled into raging rivers, turning familiar streets into watery labyrinths.…

4500 Spencer Highway, Pasadena, Texas. Today it's an empty lot — but people still pull over to take pictures of nothing, because of what stood there. Gilley's. The honky-tonk they billed as the biggest in the world,…

An outdoor display of giant welded-metal sculptures along the edge of the Texas Pipe and Supply pipe yard including a King Kong hanging from a crane a 20-foot…

You're driving past the Confederate Cemetery in Alvin. Established in the 1890s by John A. Wharton Camp, U.C.V., this was originally a burial ground for Confederate veterans and their families. Later, its use was…

Tropical Storm Claudette stalled after landfall on July 24, 1979, pinned by a blocking ridge, and unloaded on the coastal plain. An observer in Alvin measured 42 inches of rain in 24 hours on July 25-26, 1979, a new…

Nolan Ryan was born in Refugio, but he was only a few weeks old when his family moved to Alvin, and this is the town that made him. He worked his way up through Alvin's youth leagues and pitched at Alvin High School,…

On July 25 and 26, 1979, the slow-moving remains of Tropical Storm Claudette parked over the Alvin area and dumped 43 inches of rain in just 24 hours at a gauge near town. That figure stood as the United States 24-hour…

Lynn Nolan Ryan Jr. grew up delivering newspapers from a bicycle in this quiet Gulf Coast town south of Houston, and his right arm would become the most feared weapon in baseball history. He threw harder than anyone who…

Sam Rayburn (Pasadena, TX) placed on the 6A Texas high school baseball stat leaderboards for the 2026 season: Aiden Englishbee (0.410 avg).

Alvin grew up around a Santa Fe Railway cattle-loading point near Mustang Bayou, in the flat coastal prairie south of Houston. A railroad employee named Alvin Morgan arrived in the 1870s, built a home here in 1879, and…

It's hard to picture now, but in the 1890s Alvin briefly boomed as a Gulf Coast fruit town. The surrounding coastal prairie turned out prolific harvests of strawberries, pears, figs, and vegetables, and the town built a…

Downtown Alvin took two staggering blows in quick succession at the turn of the century. First the 1900 Galveston hurricane, the deadliest disaster in American history, swept inland and destroyed or damaged most of…

The Slover-Rogers Cottage looks like a miniature storybook mansion dropped into Alvin. It was built around 1900 by John G. Slover, a Civil War veteran, using salvaged wood from the Great Storm of 1900, the same…

In 1978, Alvin Community College teamed up with the University of Texas at Austin to chase an unusual idea: pulling energy out of hot, deeply buried, high-pressure water trapped beneath the Gulf Coast. That made Alvin…

The Alvin Historical Museum sits inside the town's former post-office building, which is a fitting home given that Alvin's very first post office was a converted railroad boxcar. Inside, the museum walks you through the…

The preserved Alvin Historic Train Depot, built in 1907, is a direct link back to the railroad that created the town in the first place. Alvin started as a Santa Fe cattle-loading point, and for decades the depot was…

Joe's Barbeque is one of Alvin's longtime Highway 6 landmarks, and like a lot of great Texas barbecue joints it started small. Joe Saladino opened his first place as a four-table barbecue restaurant in nearby Manvel…

That was Kirko Bangz, a Houston story through and through. Born Kirk Jerel Randle, he came up in the city's North Shore area and later studied at Prairie View A and M University. He built his name the H-Town way --…

For most of its life this was one of the smallest dots on the Texas map. After Iowa Colony was founded in 1908, its population crept up to about 27 people and then simply stopped, holding at that handful of residents…

The town you're passing in northern Brazoria County wears its origin story right in its name. Iowa Colony was founded in 1908 by the Immigration Land Company of Des Moines, Iowa, a land-promotion outfit that sold this…

Before the subdivisions arrived, tiny Iowa Colony made its name a different way: as one of the most notorious speed traps on State Highway 288. In the early 1990s the little town, then home to only a few hundred people,…

You're cruising past the Birchfield-McCown House in Alvin, a Victorian beauty built in 1894 by A.J. Birchfield, the first editor of the Alvin Sun. This grand 12-room house wasn't just a home; it was a sanctuary. During…

Most master-planned communities brag about a pool. Iowa Colony's Meridiana built an actual water park. Adventure Cove sits inside the development as a roughly two-acre aquatic complex, anchored by a 9,300-square-foot…

You're driving past the Cummings-Smith House, a Victorian beauty with a story of survival. After the devastating 1900 Galveston hurricane wiped out his home, banker Oscar Cummings decided to rebuild. He hired Booth and…

You're driving through Alvin, and right here is the site of the First Presbyterian Church. Its story starts back in 1890, when families moved here for farm work. Among them were Presbyterians who, with help from the…

James Madison High School (13719 White Heather Dr., Houston, TX), home of the Marlins, is where Vince Young became a high school legend. He started at quarterback for three years, piled up 12,987 yards of total offense,…

Milby (Houston, TX) placed on the 5A Texas high school baseball stat leaderboards for the 2026 season: Rogelio Ontiveros (0.486 avg, 2 HR).

Next time you're rolling across south Houston, look down at that slow brown ribbon of water — that's Sims Bayou, and it's named for a guy who literally measured Texas with a chain. Bartlett Samuel Sims came down from…

If you were driving down Spencer Highway in the late 1970s, you couldn't miss it: Gilley's, the world's largest honky-tonk. Owned by country singer Mickey Gilley, this sprawling nightclub was the heart of Pasadena's…

Alvin High School (802 South Johnson St., Alvin, TX) launched Nolan Ryan, baseball's all-time strikeout king. In the spring of 1965 he went 19-3 with 211 strikeouts and carried the Alvin Yellow Jackets to the Texas…

You're driving through Pasadena, Texas, and right here is where the legendary Gilley's once stood. Opened in 1970 by Sherwood Cryer and country star Mickey Gilley, this wasn't just a nightclub; it was the world's…

After the catastrophic 1900 Galveston hurricane, the American Red Cross, led by its seventy-eight-year-old founder Clara Barton, set up a relief effort on the coastal prairie. Instead of just handing out supplies,…

On October 23, 1989, Pasadena experienced one of the worst industrial accidents in U.S. history. At the Phillips Petroleum Company's Houston Chemical Complex, more than eighty-five thousand pounds of flammable gas…

You might not feel it, but the ground beneath Pasadena has been sinking for decades. This phenomenon, called land subsidence, is a major engineering and environmental challenge for the entire Houston region. For much of…

Jeff McKissack was a Houston postal worker who believed the orange was the perfect food, the key to human health and longevity, and worthy of a monument. Starting in 1956, he began building that monument in his backyard…

You're driving through Houston, and right here, you're passing by the birthplace of a Texas broadcasting legend. Felix H. Morales, born in New Braunfels, built a life in Houston, overcoming the Great Depression to open…

You're driving through Pasadena, home of the legendary Gilley's nightclub. Right here, in <say-as interpret-as="date" format="y">1970</say-as>, Mickey Gilley and Sherwood Cryer opened this honky-tonk, billed as the…

Webster is named for James W. Webster, an Englishman who brought a colony of his countrymen to this coastal prairie in 1879. The settlers were market gardeners, and the colony's original name was actually Gardentown.…