Whitney, Texas

Everything Whitney is known for

1 song mention this city 1 artist from here

Music in Whitney

Songs About Whitney

feeling whitney
warren zeiders
85%

Artists From Whitney

L
Lincoln Durham
americana

Rivers & Roads in Song near Whitney

Songs written about the waterways and highways that run near Whitney.

Brazos River 42 songs Interstate 35 43 songs Chisholm Trail 8 songs

Musical Heritage

The Name the Ironworkers Gave Him RoadyGoat

1934

The most quoted list of Texas towns in country music was written by a man who grew up in this one. Sanger Shafer was born just outside Whitney in 1934, into a gospel-singing house. Both his parents sang with the Stamps Blue Jackets, a quartet out of the Stamps School of Music in Dallas, and his mother played piano and taught him. An uncle handed him his first guitar in junior high, and he played in the school bands here. The name everybody knows him by came off a job. In high school he worked for a local ironworking crew, and those men never bothered to learn he was called Sanger. They took one look and called him Whitey, and that is the name on his Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame plaque. Getting to that plaque took a while. He did a stretch in the Army, dug ditches, ran a turkey farm over toward Waco, and played the Circle R Club seven nights a week for close to nothing. He did not write his first song until he was about thirty. Then he got a demo to his hero Lefty Frizzell, who cut one of the songs right away and turned into his closest writing partner. Whitey Shafer wrote Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind, and he wrote All My Ex's Live in Texas with his fourth wife. Both went to number one for George Strait. He said the ex's song was a true story, kind of, that he changed the names to protect the guilty and changed the towns too. Whitney is not one of the four towns it names. And the last line, the joke about hanging his hat in Tennessee, turned out to be the plan. He lived out the rest of his life there and died in Tennessee in 2019.

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The Fire That Saved Texas Courthouses RoadyGoat

1993

The fire that nearly destroyed Hillsboro's courthouse ended up saving historic courthouses across Texas. On New Year's Day in 1993, an electrical short set the 1890 Hill County Courthouse ablaze. The roof and the seventy-foot clock tower collapsed, and the courthouse bell, cast in Baltimore and weighing more than fifteen hundred pounds, crashed down into the district courtroom. When the smoke cleared, only the limestone exterior walls were still standing. Instead of replacing it with a modern box, Hill County chose to rebuild the courthouse exactly as architect W. C. Dodson had drawn it, finishing the restoration in 1999. Hillsboro native Bob Bullock, then the lieutenant governor, championed the effort, and the most famous musician from a tiny town just down the road in Hill County played benefit concerts to help pay for it. The disaster helped inspire what became the Texas Historic Courthouse Preservation Program, which has since rescued courthouses all over the state. (Sources: Texas Highways; Texas Historical Commission; Architexas.)

11.9 mi away

The Hillsboro Drummer Who Helped Invent Rock RoadyGoat

1939

Hillsboro's best music story might be a drummer. Jerry Allison was born here in 1939, and he became the drummer for Buddy Holly and the Crickets, one of the bands that essentially invented rock and roll. Allison co-wrote two of the songs that started it all, Peggy Sue and That'll Be the Day. He always told the story that the second title came straight off the movie screen: he and Holly had just watched John Wayne repeat the line over and over in the 1956 western The Searchers, and as Allison remembered it, within about thirty minutes they had written the song. It is a remarkable thing to stand on the Hillsboro square and realize this small Central Texas town has a direct line to the birth of modern rock. (Sources: Wikipedia, with cited sources; Vintage Rock, 2022 interview.)

11.9 mi away

Hillsboro's Hand in a Famous Prison Album RoadyGoat

1932

Coming out of Huntsville's prison-music history, there is a perfect Hillsboro footnote. Record producer Bob Johnston was born here in 1932. He went on to produce some of the most important records of his era, working with Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Simon and Garfunkel. And he produced the man in black's landmark live album recorded inside Folsom Prison, which means this Hill County town has an indirect hand in one of the most famous prison recordings ever made. Johnston summed up his whole production philosophy in one rough, honest line that fit a room full of inmates as well as any studio: don't ever quit, don't stop playing, and if you do, don't come back. (Sources: Wikipedia, with cited sources; UNCUT; Briscoe Center.)

11.9 mi away

History of Whitney

Taming the Brazos: The Whitney Dam RoadyGoat

The lake that defines Whitney is no accident of nature; it’s a massive feat of civil engineering. For the first half of the 20th century, the Brazos River was a menace, prone to devastating floods that wiped out farms and cities downstream. To solve this, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers designed the Whitney Dam. Construction began in 1947. It’s a gravity and earthfill dam, a hybrid design. The concrete section you can see from the park below uses its immense weight—over a million tons of concrete—to hold back the water. This section also houses the powerhouse, where turbines convert the water's flow into hydroelectricity. The rest of the dam is a massive earthen embankment stretching over two miles long. When it was finished in 1951, this carefully engineered structure transformed the Brazos from a threat into a resource, providing flood control, power, and the recreational lake that gave the town of Whitney its modern identity.

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The Ghost of Towash RoadyGoat

A few miles from here there is a town you cannot visit, because it is under the lake. It is called Towash, and it started in 1835, when a band of Ioni Indians moved from Louisiana to the east bank of the Brazos. The settlement took the name of their leader. A grist mill and carding machine went up in 1850 and made the place a trading center, and by 1879 Towash had fifteen business enterprises. That same year the Houston and Texas Central laid track across the prairie and established Whitney, the first railroad town in Hill County. The merchants of Towash did the math. They moved their businesses, and in some cases the buildings themselves, over to the new town on the tracks, and Towash emptied out. The deserted place stood there for another seventy years. Then in 1951 the Whitney Dam was finished, and the lake rose over the site. When people fish that water, they are floating above a town that was already a ghost before it ever drowned.

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The House on the Cliff RoadyGoat

Imagine watching your backyard crack open above a seventy-five-foot drop. That is what happened at the White Bluff community on Lake Whitney. For years, a luxury home sat on a scenic bluff with a spectacular view of the water, and the geology that made the view was also what undid it. Water had been working into the soft rock at the base of the limestone, and a long fissure opened in the cliff behind the house. The home was condemned as it began to slide with the cliff face, and the ending was not the one you would expect. On June 13, 2014, fire crews deliberately burned the house to the ground, because letting it fall on its own would have dumped a mansion's worth of debris into the lake. Then in May 2015, during a severe storm, a huge section of that cracked bluff let go and crashed into the water. The fissure kept widening afterward and began to threaten a neighbor's home. It was a very public lesson in geology: on Lake Whitney, the view and the risk are the same rock.

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Whitney - Battle of the Benches

1949

In 1949 the women of Whitney, Texas, tried to have the cedar benches on Main Street moved to an alley because of the spitting, whittling, and cussing of the men who sat on them. The dispute went to an election. The men won. Life magazine covered the story. The refurbished benches now sit on the porch of the Lake Whitney Museum at 303 North Brazos Street.

Duncan, Thomas Elmer [Tommy]

1932

Thomas (Tommy) Elmer Duncan, singer and songwriter, was born on January 11, 1911, in Whitney, Texas, into a large and impoverished family of truck farmers. He was the son of Jackson Limuel Byrd Duncan and Edna Nash (Powers) Duncan. On the farm he worked with African Americans who indelibly marked his singing style and repertoire. He was influenced, according to his sister Corrine Andrews, "by the records of colored people and by the recordings of Jimmie Rodgers" ( James Charles Rodgers ). When he was seventeen he left home and moved in with a cousin near Hedley, where residents remembered that Duncan sang Jimmie Rodgers songs as he drove along in an "old stripped-down car." He evidently went broke on a farm he had leased in Hedley and in the early 1930s was still broke, out of work, and living in Fort Worth. But the show-business bug had bitten him, and he was determined to have a career as a singer. Clifton "Sleepy" Johnson, an early member of the Light Crust Doughboys , recalled first seeing Duncan playing a little cheap guitar "about a foot and a half long" and singing at the Ace High root beer stand for tips. In 1932 Duncan won an audition against sixty-six other singers to join bandleader James Robert (Bob) Wills as the vocalist for the Light Crust Doughboys. He was versatile in his singing style and repertoire, had a fine voice and range, and was ideal for the kind of dance music Wills performed. In his earliest recording sessions for Wills, he sang everything from ballads and folk to pop, Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and cowboy songs. Even in songs with sad lyrics he maintained a touch of fun. Duncan had "soul" in his singing like black blues singers, not the sentimentality of some country singers. His versatility was well-suited to the western swing music that he and Wills pioneered. When Wills left the Light Crust Doughboys in August 1933 to form the Texas Playboys, Duncan went with him. Alton Stricklin , a member of the group, observed that Duncan remembered the lyrics to more than 4,000 songs and could learn the words to a new song within fifteen minutes. The song that made the Texas Playboys famous was a folk-rooted pop song that Irving Berlin heard Wills play as a fiddle instrumental and published in 1940. Since Berlin wanted lyrics for the selection, Wills asked Duncan and several other band members to help him write words for the fiddle tune. Wills called it "New San Antonio Rose." In 1940 Wills recorded it in Dallas. That recording, with the brilliant Duncan vocals, sold three million copies for Columbia Records (now CBS Records). Bing Crosby then recorded it and won his second gold record. Tommy Duncan was the first member of Wills's band to volunteer for the armed services after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He rejoined Wills in 1944 as the war neared its end and as Bob Wills was becoming even more famous in music and the movies. Duncan appeared with Wills in several movies, including Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys (1944), Rhythm Roundup (1945), Blazing the Western Trail (1945), Lawless Empire (1945), and Frontier Frolic (1946). He became not only a movie star but the most famous singer in all of western swing. His voice matured in the middle to late 1940s, and he became a star in his own right, second only to Wills himself in the Texas Playboy band. Duncan, who could also play piano and guitar, joined Wills in writing several numbers, including "New Spanish Two Step" (1945), "Stay a Little Longer" (1945), "Cotton-Eyed Joe" (1946), and "Sally Goodin" (1947). For various reasons, including Wills's periodic drinking and Duncan's own ego and ambition to strike out on his own, Duncan left the Texas Playboys in 1948. He organized one of the best western swing bands ever assembled, Tommy Duncan and His Western All Stars. Although the band was technically perfect, and Duncan's singing was excellent, the band lacked the spark that had made Wills's group exciting. The band had only minor success with such recordings as "

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Whitney

1879

Whitney, the first railroad town in Hill County, was established in 1879 on the route of the Houston and Texas Central Railroad and was named for railroad investor Charles A. Whitney. Lots in the new town were sold at a "Grand Picnic" on November 25, 1879. An eager crowd bid on the lots which sold at prices ranging between $100 and $750. Several merchants who purchased lots established "tent stores" while carpenters worked night and day to complete wooden frame stores. Soon a central business district was in operation. The new town included a post office, bank, school, several churches, civic organizations, a newspaper, and many businesses. The opera house was the cultural center for entertainment, offering theatrical and musical productions and, later, movies. Several devastating fires burned much of the downtown area over the years, but the citizens rebuilt each time. The building of nearby Whitney Dam caused the town's population to expand in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and brought increased tourism from those visiting the newly created Lake Whitney. The town of Whitney observed its 100th birthday on November 25, 1979. A centennial celebration included a parade, musical entertainment, and fireworks.

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Whitney, TX

1876

Whitney is at the intersection of State Highway 22 and Farm roads 933 and 1244, two miles southeast of Lake Whitney and twelve miles southwest of Hillsboro in western Hill County. It was established in 1876 when the Houston and Texas Central Railroad built a line through Hill County to Cleburne. On November 25, 1879, the town lots were auctioned from a wagon on the site of the future depot. The land, which was originally part of the Sterling Robertson grant, was purchased by the railroad from I. E. Griffith, C. C. Hicks, and Lewis Raborn for fifteen dollars an acre. The sale, which served as entertainment for Hill County residents, netted $32,000 for the lots that sold for $100 to $750 each. The town was named for Charles A. Whitney, the son-in-law of Charles Morgan , and a principal stock holder in the H&TC. Whitney became a boom town with merchants setting up tents to serve as temporary stores. Merchants from nearby communities, such as Towash, moved their businesses and buildings to Whitney because of the growth expected from the railroad. The postmasters of Towash and Hamilton Springs, two nearby communities, moved their post offices to Whitney. Several months later John Napier was appointed the first official postmaster, and Whitney officially had a post office in 1880. Hill County crops in 1880 were a failure, and the railroad promised that the first train to town would bring a bushel of corn for each person in the area. Many residents had not had bread for months, and the trains carried carloads of corn for months. In 1882 a good crop sent 22,000 bales of cotton from Whitney. In 1880 Whitney was incorporated, and the first bank opened. By 1883 the population was estimated at 1,200. School was held in a store and then in the Presbyterian church before enough money was raised through donations to build a schoolhouse in 1884. In 1885 Whitney was incorporated as a school district and levied a school tax. That same year a black school was built. By then the town had a newspaper named the Whitney Messenger , the Boesche Lumber Company, and four churches, Methodist Episcopal, Cumberland Presbyterian, First Baptist, and Church of Christ. After 1883 the population of Whitney began a decline. A fire in 1885 destroyed thirty of the community's frame buildings. By the end of the decade most of the frame buildings had been replaced by brick. In 1890 the population was 400, and businesses included two gristmills and cotton gins, grocery stores, millinery shops, saloons, and shoemakers. The railroad shipped cotton, grain, livestock, and wool. Because of the declining population the citizens of Whitney decided to promote their town with a picnic in 1891. The community barbecued 3,500 pounds of meat, and special excursion trains ran from as far as Brenham to bring people to Whitney. There were political speakers, tournaments, races, and dancing. The picnic was a success. Six thousand people attended, and by 1895 the population was once again over 1,000. The town was incorporated and unincorporated several times and finally incorporated permanently in 1912. The city government was established in 1915. At that time they purchased the water and electric company, founded in 1896, which supplied water with very low pressure and electricity only at night. After the decline of the cotton market in 1915 the population began to decline. By 1930 Whitney had 750 residents and thirty businesses. During the Great Depression Texas relief funds provided some jobs on roads and opened a cannery by 1934. The Work Projects Administration provided funds to build a concrete bridge to replace a wooden one, a lighted athletic field, and a sewer system in 1935. When the Whitney Dam and Reservoir Project was authorized in 1944 a bond election was held to raise taxes to improve city services. The reservoir project began in 1946, and Highway 22, relocated over the dam, was opened in 1951. The power plant was in operation by 1953. In 1950 Whitney had a population

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Walling, Jesse

1836

Star and Wreath Participated in the Battle of San Jacinto. Erected by the State of Texas 1957

Historical Marker →

Whitney Messenger

1883

The Whitney Messenger , the community newspaper of Whitney, Texas, was founded on November 2, 1883, by H. P. and J. O. Jones. Throughout its history the paper was owned and edited by a variety of people expressing different political views, but its most important duty from its founding in 1883 to the present was in reporting community events and carrying advertising for local merchants. The Mayes family's long relationship with the paper began in 1890, when it was sold to J. T. and D. S. Mayes. Several different members of the Mayes family controlled the paper until 1916. From 1916 to 1933 it was owned by J. L. Yarbro. From 1933 to 1951 it was once again run by the Mayes family. Leonard Webb bought the paper in 1951 and served as its editor for the next twenty-three years; he was also serving twenty-eight years as justice of the peace. After 1951 the newspaper had several different owners. The Whitney Messenger was published continuously from its founding in 1883 to the 1990s, except for a year and a half during World War II when its editor, L. B. Mayes, went to California to work in a defense plant. In 1991 the weekly newspaper was edited by Nelson Bryan and had a circulation of 450.

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Things to Do in Whitney

food 16.7 mi away
The Czech Stop

In 1983 Bill Polk opened a little convenience store off I-35 in West Texas and started selling kolaches he bought from a nearby bakery. The pastries moved so…
historical 19.0 mi away
Murder of the Disk Plow Inventor

Young Ole Ringness grew up on a Norse farm near Clifton watching mud cup inside a wagon wheel. That observation inspired the disk plow and disk harrow. In 1872…
historical 19.0 mi away
The 11000-Year-Old Shaman Burial

In 1970 archaeologists excavated a limestone overhang along the Bosque River near Clifton and found something extraordinary. The 11000-year-old remains of a…
quirky 19.0 mi away
The Day Clifton Out-Snowed the Panhandle

On December 21 1929 a weather station near Clifton recorded 24 inches of snowfall in a single day. That is the all-time daily snowfall record for the entire…
historical 19.0 mi away
Norwegian Capital of Texas

In 1854 a band of eighteen Norwegian immigrants led by Cleng Peerson settled in the hills west of Clifton. They built homes from native limestone because rock…
historical 19.1 mi away
The Father of Norwegian Immigration

Cleng Peerson is buried near Clifton in the tiny Norse community he helped found. Known as the Father of Norwegian Immigration to America he first scouted New…
food 16.5 mi away
Slovacek's West

I-35 exit 353 in West, Texas — the rival Czech bakery to the Czech Stop across the highway. Over 35 kolache varieties, in-house smoked meats, and a full deli…
quirky 18.9 mi away
The Limestone Homesteads of Norse

The Norwegian settlers near Clifton built everything from native limestone because trees were scarce on the Bosque County prairie. About 40 of these hand-cut…

Everything Near Whitney

381 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the nearest 200 are listed here — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.

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