Texas Roadside Picnic Areas

In the 1930’s, Texas began building roadside picnic areas alongside state roads and highways to provide places for travelers to take a break and maybe enjoy a meal they might bring along their journey.  The roots of the program to develop these stopping places can be traced to the National Park Service (NPS), the Great Depression era National Youth Administration (NYA), and the 1936 Texas Centennial celebration at the Texas State Fair in Dallas. In Texas, Picnic Areas are distinguished from Rest Areas and Safety Rest Areas in that they do not have any facilities such as restrooms or food vending machines.

The earliest Picnic Areas typically consisted of 2 or 3 picnic tables on an acre or two, grills for cooking, and bins for rubbish.  They were designed in what was called a “rustic aesthetic” to fit naturally within the landscape using stone and concrete, and wood covers for shade when needed.  Particularly noteworthy, the land upon which many were built was donated by local private landowners and some of the Picnic Areas situated near small towns were also intended to serve as the town’s park.  In general, the purposes of these small and spartan facilities were to provide both safety for road travelers and beautification of roads.  The safety factor was in part designed to address the perceived monotony of driving in or across Texas, with its long stretches of flat and to some, uninteresting landscape. 

While approximately 400 of these stone and concrete areas were constructed during the 1930’s and into the 1940’s, today only 40 or so of those remain.    Most were removed altogether, updated in some way, or replaced with designs requiring less maintenance.  While the Depression era had provided ample low-cost labor subsidized or supported through Federal funds into the NYA, starting in the 1940’s and going forward, the desire and need for less labor intensive, easier to construct, and designs requiring less ongoing maintenance heralded the introduction of the Mid-Century Modern styled structures we generally see today and that have captured my photographic interests. There are now more than 400 of these spread throughout Texas.

While the earliest rustic aesthetic styled structures I find of nostalgic and of historic value, it is the varied Mid-Century Modern designs that have captured my interest and attention for decades as I have driven around this great and vast state.  So many times I have driven the highways headed toward some destination and looked at the seemingly simple, yet at times striking, covered shelters and thought, “I need to photograph these.”  I realized the Picnic Areas needed to become the destinations in their own right. 

It seems it took the Covid era travel restrictions and limitations to be the catalyst for me to drive around Texas and capture as many, if not all, of these Picnic Areas as possible.  At the outset I was unsure as to what I might do with photographs of 400 or more roadside picnic areas, but I thought that inasmuch as these were and are intended for Texas road travelers, it might be interesting to find out where one is led when making the Picnic Areas the destinations.

The planning and organization started with online research, and thankfully the Texas Department of Transportation or TXDoT (“tex-dot” as it is referred to), had a comprehensive study prepared of the Picnic Areas, Rest Areas, and Safety Rest Areas, with this document published in 2015 providing travel history in Texas dating back to the 1800’s.  TXDoT also has an exceptional state road map, with a modified version shown above to reflect the locations of each and every one of the over 400 Picnic Areas identified by a small dot (Red on the map above) on a large-scale map, and the map also contains the location of each of Texas State Parks (Green on the map above). I determined the Texas State Parks could serve as basecamps when traveling with my camper to photograph the Picnic Areas within some circumference I could cover in a day or two around the parks. 

This gallery reflects a selection of images of these Texas roadside Picnic Areas I started capturing in January 2021 and this collection will continue to grow over time with the hope that I see, and capture, all of them. What I have learned thus far is that capturing these may have some value from an historical perspective because convenience stores and gas stations, along with faster cars that reduce the possibility of monotony, are reducing the important purposes the Picnic Areas served decades ago. But what this journey has also revealed is that from a personal perspective, by making the Picnic Areas the destinations, I am seeing every part of this great and vast State, going through towns I would not make as a destination and am now seeing them, and learning a bit about each and every part of the Texas that I may not have known.