Wharton: Horton Foote & Dan Rather's Hometown

For a town its size, Wharton has sent an outsized number of storytellers into the wider world. This Colorado River county seat, founded in 1846, was the boyhood home of two of them: Horton Foote, the playwright and screenwriter who won two Academy Awards and a Pulitzer Prize and who set much of his life's work in a fictional Texas town modeled on this one, and Dan Rather, the CBS newsman who anchored the evening news for a quarter century. Both were born here, and both carried Wharton with them. This walking tour circles the courthouse square and the blocks just off it, tracing the buildings, banks, and historic homes of the town they grew up in — and pausing at the modest Foote family home a short stroll from the square. It is a walk through the ordinary Texas streetscape that shaped two extraordinary American careers.