Food
Mary's Cafe
Mary’s Cafe in Strawn is famous for one crispy, golden reason: the chicken fried steak. Mary opened her cafe 40 years ago and has become the chicken fried queen of Texas. This time she finally let me in the kitchen, where they pound the flour into the meat and cook each steak on a flat top in clarified butter. The large comes with a bowl of cream gravy and spills right off the plate. She’ll talk recipes all day, but don’t ask what’s in the seasoning. That stays secret.
Mel's Sweets & Eats
Hiding inside an old building in Strawn is a mini mall of surprises, including Mel’s Sweets & Eats. Mel brought a little of the East Coast with her, scooping 16 flavors of Hershey’s ice cream, and you can get any of them in a milkshake. Even after polishing off a Mary’s chicken fried steak, I found room in my second stomach for dessert. Visitors to the new state park have sparked new life in this town of about 500 people, and Mel is becoming a local hero.
New York Hill Restaurant
High atop New York Hill, where Thurber’s white-collar elite once lived on what was called Silk Stocking Row, the Mills family has served classic country cooking for 35 years. Three generations run the place, and the walls are covered with Thurber photos and keepsakes that locals bring in. Start with a basket of warm homemade rolls and honey. Hand-cut steaks are the best seller, so I went with a ribeye topped with garlic butter and a skewer of shrimp. Save room for a homemade cinnamon roll.
Culture
Old Jail Museum Complex
If you want to dig deep into Palo Pinto County history, you have no choice but to throw yourself in jail. The old Palo Pinto County Jail, built in the 1880s, holds artifacts like a fake gun made of lye soap and boot polish that was used in a 1938 breakout. The museum complex covers a whole era of Wild West history, with an 1800s log cabin hiding a secret room and an old stone fort moved here stone by stone, built from logs dated to the 1700s.
W.K. Gordon Center for Industrial History of Texas
This quiet stretch of prairie once held Thurber, a company town of 10,000 people built by the Texas and Pacific Coal Company, which owned everything from the stores to the backyard chicken coops. The W.K. Gordon Center tells the story of miners from 15 to 18 different ethnicities, and of Thurber brick, which paved Congress Avenue in Austin and the Fort Worth Stockyards. When oil replaced coal, the town was sold off piece by piece. Today a lone smokestack, a church and a few buildings remain.
Outdoors
Palo Pinto Mountains State Park
Yes, Texas has mountains. The Palo Pintos are a small range about 90 miles west of Fort Worth, and right in the middle sits Palo Pinto Mountains State Park, the first new Texas state park in 18 years. Nearly 5,000 acres surround a 91-acre lake built in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration. There are 16 miles of finished trails past rock outcroppings that look like crumbling layer cakes, and I watched a bald eagle land by the lake. Just stick to the trail, unlike my crew.
