Wild West Roanoke

Roanoke wears its frontier railhead past on its sleeve. The town began in 1881 when the Texas & Pacific Railroad came through and a surveyor — homesick for Roanoke, Virginia — gave it the name. Settlers had been in the area since the late 1840s, drifting in from older communities like Medlin Settlement and Elizabethtown, and the railroad turned the new town into a shipping hub for the big ranches and wheat-and-cotton farms around it. Stock pens held cattle bound for northern markets, and by 1890 the place had four churches and a busy main street. Today that old Oak Street core bills itself as the Unique Dining Capital of Texas, but the frontier bones still show. This compact loop ties together the town marker, the Masonic lodge, the landmark water tower, and the pioneer Odd Fellows cemetery just outside downtown.