Ancient Web: Texas Escapes Tried to Tell the Story of Every Texas Town

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Texas Escapes began with an impossible-sounding editorial ambition: tell the story of every town in Texas, including the ones that barely exist anymore.

Visit Texas Escapes Online Magazine.

The site identifies July 1998 as its starting point. In its mission statement, editor John Troesser and webmaster Kate Wong Troesser describe a husband-and-wife operation built around visits to small towns and the stories people told them. Their twenty-fifth-anniversary note in 2023 thanks the many contributors who supplied photographs and recollections.

The front page now links Texas's 254 counties, a town list numbering more than three thousand entries, and a ghost-town index numbering more than a thousand. Those counts are displayed by the site and may change; they are evidence of its indexing ambition, not a claim that every village's history has been exhaustively verified.

History lives in the family album

The site's categories range far beyond standard travel listings. It keeps old photographs, courthouses, depots, post offices, theaters, grain elevators, ghost signs, cemeteries, schoolhouses, and small-town stories. Historic architectural details receive their own indexes, as do bridges and water towers.

The ghost-town section works region by region. Readers can investigate places that faded when a railway moved, an industry closed, or residents departed. A county or town page often leads to an unexpected local reminiscence rather than a polished tourism pitch.

The Troessers write that people responded to their project with intensely personal memories. Former residents remembered Depression-era neighbors; veterans wrote about homes they had left; people sent photographs from family albums. The editors saw those contributions as oral history that might otherwise disappear.

That makes this an early example of reader-supported public memory. It was not crowdsourcing through a commercial encyclopedia platform, but an independently edited magazine that kept the credit and human context of supplied material.

The website remains active and has many newer pages, yet the old hand-linked structure and mission are still visible. Not every memory is independently verifiable, so dates and claims on individual town pages may require separate checking.

Browse the Texas ghost-town index and read the founding mission.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.