College, Cattle & the Petrified Camp

The Decatur square tells the county's civic story; this driving loop tells the rest. Decatur was home to a Baptist college famous as the world's first planned junior college, and to the Waggoners, one of the great cattle-and-oil dynasties of Texas, whose mansion still stands east of town. It was also a stop on old US-81, where a 1920s entrepreneur faced a roadside gas station and cabins entirely in petrified wood and turned an overnight camp into a Texas legend. This route ties those threads together — the college, the cattleman's mansion, the petrified tourist camp — and reaches out to the frontier edges of the county: the Butterfield stage line that crossed here and the site of an 1837 battle that marks how violent the early days really were. It is Decatur's wide-angle story, from cattle empires to roadside wonders.