Texas Highways Magazine October 2022

This month’s story on Texas’ only native pepper, the chile pequin, originated from a conversation between our new senior editor, Danielle Lopez, and her father. She started her research by calling her dad, who like many Texans, has been on a lifelong quest to find the perfect salsa. “He started telling me about how his mom would pick fresh pequins that grew around their house in Pharr and bring them in to make a really hot, delicious salsa,” she says. “It’s a very common practice among South Texans. But he joked that we don't see it in restaurants too often because people can’t handle the heat.” Danielle joined our team in June to head up our food coverage, after stints at the Alcalde, KUT, and the Texas Observer. One of…

When she was growing up in San Antonio, writer Cat Cardenas remembers picking chile pequin from a lot next to her grandfather’s house. “He would send us over to a little shrub with a couple of empty jars,” the Austin-based writer says, “and we’d collect as many as we could and bring them back to his kitchen so he could make fresh salsa.” Cardenas wrote “Some Like It Hot” (Page 36) as an ode to the pequin, the only native pepper in the state. “I hope it helps people develop an appreciation for the native plants of Texas and the people who have spent years cultivating them and developing so many of the Tex-Mex staples we know and love,” she says. Featured Contributors Rubén Degollado For “Home Before Sundown” (Page 14), Degollado traveled…

In South Texas, our friends from the northern Midwestern states are called Winter Texans, not snowbirds. Those folks called snowbirds are Yankees from the Northeast and go to Florida. Ray Moore, McAllen Biker’s Heaven We had a chance to visit the Texas Vintage Motorcycle Museum with our car club back in June [“Vroom Room,” September]. I was expecting to see the large American bikes that ruled the 1950s and 1960s. I was amazed to see that the collection featured the stars of the 1970s. The Honda CBX with its six cylinder in-line motor. The Norton Commando with right hand gear shift. The Triumphs, Bultacos, BMWs, and so many more. For anyone who started riding in the 1970s, these machines bring you right back to those times. The exhibit includes regular stock machines as…

Before Galveston and Houston were connected by rail, boats plied Highland Bayou between the two Gulf Coast cities. Farmers settled along the bayou and Galveston Bay in the mid-1800s, forming a community that became Hitchcock in the 1870s. The settlers included Henry Martyn Stringfellow, a Confederate veteran renowned for his organic farming practices. Over the decades, Stringfellow Orchards eventually fell into disrepair before Samuel Collins III bought the remaining 10 acres in 2005. Collins, 51, was born in Galveston, grew up in Hitchcock, and now lives in neighboring La Marque with his wife, Doris. He restored the property’s 1880s Victorian residence as an office for his financial consulting business. Collins has long been active in promoting the area’s African American heritage, including fundraising for the Absolute Equality mural in Galveston.…

In the only photograph I have of my grandfather, taken in the 1970s, he is wearing his City of Hidalgo deputy marshal uniform. He is half smiling, head slightly askew, with one hand on his leather police belt. Whenever I see this picture, it’s not his uniform, his badge, or the .357 Magnum on his hip that draws me in. It’s the expression in his eyes: kind and gentle, but also commanding of respect and wary of wrongdoers. It’s also the way he wears his cowboy hat, back on his head and tilted left at a cocked angle. In those eyes, I see strength and courage, but also love for his family and for the town he helped build, first as a school bus driver, then a taxicab company owner,…

SHILOH CEMETERY 1043-1143 CR 139, Hutto. The nearly 3-acre patch of green off County Road 139 in Hutto was covered in weeds and trash for decades. Several of the remaining tombstones and wooden markers were chipped and rotting. Most passersby likely thought the site was an overgrown field with an illegal dumping ground in the back. Until Hutto resident Robyn Bieber and organizations including Black Families of Hutto fought to clear the refuse and add signage, Shiloh Cemetery was one of roughly a couple hundred aging Black cemeteries across Texas that could have faded away. But now the cemetery is accessible to the public, providing generations of descendants access to where their ancestors were laid to rest. “I was astounded at how bad these cemeteries can get,” says Bieber, a veteran, mom…