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City Spotlight: Palo Pinto Mountains
Explore the Palo Pinto Mountains and the surrounding county with PBS’s “The Daytripper.”
About an hour and a half west of Fort Worth is a hidden mountain range that many, even North Texans, don’t know about: the Palo Pinto Mountains. Now, these aren’t mountains of Colorado grandeur by any means (they’re more like rolling hills), but they are officially mountains — and they’re still pretty impressive. In this beautiful, little-known part of the country, there are a couple of small towns that likewise keep some wonderful little secrets themselves.
Palo Pinto Mountains State Park
A decade in the making, Palo Pinto Mountains State Park opened in March. It’s North Texas’ first new state park in 25 years and takes up a big swath of the Palo Pinto Mountains. The rugged, rolling terrain is amazing for hiking, mountain biking, and horseback riding. The 90-acre Tucker Lake is terrific for fishing and kayaking, and you’ll see some amazing natural sights. While I was paddling, two bald eagles swooped up and perched right in front of me. People are already flocking to this new park to check out the Palo Pinto Mountains for themselves — it’s easily one of the best state parks in North Texas.
Strawn
When you’re done exploring the mountains, go get lunch at Mary’s Cafe in Strawn, the little town on the state park’s border. Mary’s serves one of the most famous (and most enormous) chicken-fried steaks in all of Texas. Instead of deep-frying her chicken-fried steaks, she cooks them in a pool of butter on a flat-top griddle. And these things are huge — like, bigger than a basketball. Everybody gets an entire soup bowl of gravy on the side to ladle on top. Bring an appetite, or you’ll leave with a couple of boxes.
Downtown Strawn is super fun to visit because it feels like you’re on an Old West movie set. And that’s because you are: “Yellowstone” creator Taylor Sheridan filmed his 2023 miniseries “Lawmen: Bass Reeves” here and painted the town’s facades to look like 1800s Texas. After Paramount packed up and left, Strawn liked the new (I mean, old) look so much that they kept it. So, burn off the behemoth chicken-fried steak by moseying around.
Thurber
If you’ve ever driven on I-20, just south of Strawn, you’ve probably seen that really huge, really random smokestack in the middle of nowhere. What you probably don’t know is that it was once the epicenter of a huge town called Thurber, which went from 10,000 residents in 1920 to practically zero today.
It has a bit of a dark history, one that Taylor Sheridan is destined to write a screenplay for one day. Thurber popped up in the 1880s, and every square inch was owned by the Texas and Pacific Coal Company. The company recruited thousands of Polish, Irish, Italian, Russian, and other immigrants to populate and work for Thurber. They occupied company houses, shopped at company stores, sent their kids to company schools, and paid for everything with the company store money they earned from sweating in the coal mine. In short, the hardworking residents of Thurber were practically owned by the coal company. At one point, there were even armed guards and barbed wire on the walls of Thurber to keep out union organizers.
Luckily, in 1903, the United Mine Workers were able to (peacefully) create a harmonious working relationship between laborers and Thurber management. But in the 1920s, when the company shut down, the owner sold off every scrap of every building, and Thurber literally disappeared. All that’s left is the smokestack.
Nearby, there are a couple of related things to see. The first is a museum called the W.K. Gordon Museum and Research Center for Industrial History of Texas, which is run by Tarleton State University and tells the story of how Thurber became a ghost town. There’s a really illuminating exhibit about the life of a 19th-century coal miner, and the extreme conditions Thurber miners had to work under while in the mines. It’s definitely worth a stop before dinner.
And that’s the last thing (and one of the best things) to do in the area: Get dinner at New York Hill. It’s named that because it’s built where all the white-collar coal company men worked, and most of them were business folks from New York. The restaurant is absolutely incredible. Every meal starts with a big basket of homemade yeast rolls. The chicken-fried steak and rib-eye steaks are great, but one of their most popular menu items is the chicken livers and gizzards. It’s not as bad as I remember them as a child, and even better when you wash them down with New York Hill’s homemade buttermilk pie.
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