Parker County Courthouse Square

Few Texas squares wear their nineteenth century as proudly as Weatherford's. At the center stands a limestone-and-granite courthouse finished in the mid-1880s, a building so handsome that the whole downtown grew up to face it, block after block of Victorian storefronts ringing the lawn. This was frontier ground: for years Weatherford was the only town of any size between Fort Worth and El Paso, and during the Civil War settlers from miles around sheltered here against raids. The square remembers all of it — the courthouse where a future governor of Texas argued cases, the rival banks that bankrolled the cattle trade, the city hall built to put men back to work in the Depression, and the women's club and pioneer homes just off the lawn. This short loop walks it all. Look up above the storefronts, where the best stonework hides.