About this tour
Devine, Lytle, and Natalia grew up as rail-spur stops along the International–Great Northern line, strung out on the Medina/Atascosa county line — small towns with outsized characters. This driving tour visits the judge who helped seize federal Texas for the Confederacy in 1861, an opera house that once hosted traveling stage troupes, a blacksmith shop where the same anvil rang for over a century, and a Masonic lodge that outlasted the town it was founded in. It closes with Robert Lee Bobbitt, a WWI veteran and Speaker of the Texas House whose small-town roots didn't stop him from reaching the top of Austin politics.