Latest posts
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Juan Seguín: The Texas Hero Who Was Driven From His Own Hometown
Texas history has a way of remembering a man’s battlefield service more clearly than what happened to him afterward. We put his name on a school, a street or a town, and sometimes forget to ask what his life was really like. Juan Seguín deserves a closer look. Born in San Antonio on October 27,…
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Sanderson to Big Bend: A West Texas Road Trip Through Marathon and the Gage Hotel
Photo by Carol M. Highsmith, courtesy of the Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication.
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St. James Catholic Church: Faith and History in Sanderson, Texas
In a town’s history, churches help tell the story of what people chose to build and carry forward. In Sanderson, St. James Catholic Church is part of that continuing story, a place of Catholic worship with ties to an earlier adobe church and a congregation whose surviving records reach into the early twentieth century. Today,…
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Is Sanderson Turning Blue—or Becoming Something Else?
A liberal, practicing Catholic who has lived in Sanderson off and on since the 1980s and lives here today reflects on the town’s changing culture and her growing distance from the Democratic Party. I am a liberal woman born in the 1960s, a practicing Catholic, and someone who remembers feeling at home in the Democratic…
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Big Bend Open Road Race: Who Benefits, Who Pays, and What Does Sanderson Get?
The Big Bend Open Road Race brings drivers, spectators, and attention to Sanderson and Fort Stockton. Organizers promote the event as an opportunity to support local businesses and raise money for community organizations. Those are benefits worth recognizing when they can be documented. But a community event should be judged by more than the money…
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The October We Feared the World Might End: A West Texas Woman Remembers the Cuban Missile Crisis
Sixty-four years have passed, but when I think about the Cuban Missile Crisis, I think first about being a little girl in West Texas and feeling afraid. I could not have explained the difference between a Soviet missile and an American one. I did not understand diplomatic negotiations or military strategy. But children do not…
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Monarch Butterflies Make a Sanderson Stopover
Each fall, the pecan trees at the Terrell County Courthouse become a resting place on a remarkable journey to Mexico. Not all of Sanderson’s seasonal visitors arrive on Highway 90. Some come on orange-and-black wings, stopping briefly before continuing a journey that stretches across much of North America. Each autumn, migrating monarch butterflies pass through…
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Women of Terrell County History: Ranch Life, Work, Family, and Community
By the SandersonTexas.org History Desk This article was written by a woman raised in West Texas, drawing on local history, public records, and the practical knowledge passed down in rural communities. The history of Terrell County cannot be told only through railroads, ranches, cowboys, and courthouse politics. Women helped make daily life possible in this…
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Before Sanderson: The First People of Terrell County and the Changing West Texas Landscape
Long before Sanderson became a railroad town, before ranch roads crossed the open country, and thousands of years before Terrell County had a name, people already knew this land. The limestone hills, dry washes, canyon country, springs, and desert basins of what is now Terrell County were part of a human landscape for millennia. The…
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Terrell County Considers Airport Lease With Fisher Industries as Residents Seek Answers
Terrell County Commissioners Court is scheduled to consider a proposed lease allowing Fisher Industries to use county airport property in Sanderson. The public agenda does not explain the company’s intended use of the property, prompting questions, concern, and cautious economic hope among local residents. Commissioners Court will meet in regular session at 9:00 a.m. Monday, September…