Texas Facts

In Corpus Christie, Texas, it is illegal to raise alligators in your home.

The city of Houston, Texas is built on a swamp and is slowly sinking!

The 'King Ranch' in Texas is bigger than the state of Rhode Island.

The United States produces enough plastic film annually to cover the entire state of Texas.

Every person in the world can fit in Texas and be given over 1000 sq ft in which to live.

In 2011, a couple bought a box of textbooks for $10. Inside, they found a 25-cent bill signed by the president of the Republic of Texas, Sam Houston, and subsequently sold it for $63,250.

Phil Collins fell in love with the Alamo at age 5, watching Disney's Davy Crockett on TV in London. The Genesis drummer spent decades secretly building the world's largest private collection of Alamo artifacts, more than 430 pieces worth tens of millions. In 2014 he gave every single one to Texas, for free.

In 1982, a Texas college student named Gregory Watson got a C on a paper arguing that a 1789 amendment by James Madison had no deadline and could still pass. He spent ten years writing letters to state lawmakers, and in 1992 it became the 27th Amendment. In 2017, his professor signed off on changing his grade to an A. Madison's amendment has been in the Constitution ever since.

In 2021, KPMG offered accountant Scott Ruskan a full-time job. He said no and joined the Coast Guard instead. On his very first mission as a rescue swimmer - the July 2025 Texas rising waters - he saved 165 people at a summer camp. He was the only rescuer on scene for four hours.

Every October, Texas and Oklahoma play their biggest football rivalry at a state fair. Carnival rides spin outside the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. More than 92,000 fans pack the stands. Tickets split 50-50 at the 50-yard line. Oklahoma's crimson fills one side, Texas's burnt orange fills the other. Locked in at the fair through 2036. Half crimson, half orange, every October.

Shaquille O'Neal has quietly rebuilt basketball courts for 30 years. The first was in Orlando, where Marquis Daniels grew up. Daniels made the NBA and told O'Neal: "Because you fixed it up, I'm here." O'Neal has since rebuilt six more courts - he's still doing it, one court at a time.

Pat Stone has walked kids across the same Lewisville, Texas street for nearly 60 years. She started the job herself in the 1960s as a Girl Scout leader. The police chief brushed her off, so a state trooper taught her to stop traffic instead. She was still arriving by 5am at 89, rain or shine. In 2024, Lewisville named the crosswalk after her. Kids still cross Miss Pat's crosswalk every school day.

Raymond Hager is 95 years old. For almost 30 years, he has driven a school bus for Wichita Falls, Texas. His boss once tried cutting him back to one day a week. Hager refused to slow down. In 2025, Guinness World Records named him the world's oldest active male bus driver. The mayor declared Hager's birthday, November 18, Raymond Hager Day. He still says one day a week just isn't enough.

The Herkie is the cheer jump: one leg kicked straight out, the other bent back. It started as a flub. Dallas teenager Lawrence Herkimer went up for a clean split jump and missed. "It was just a poor split jump," he said later. "I don't like to tell people that." The jump took his name anyway. Squads still throw it every Friday night.

More than 800 C-47 transport planes carried over 13,000 paratroopers across the Channel before dawn on D-Day. One flew at the front. After the war it hauled freight for decades. Then it sat in a Wisconsin boneyard, next in line to be cut up and modernized. An Air Force historian chasing a serial number found it there. Passengers still board through the door the paratroopers jumped from.

Plennie Wingo walked backwards out of Fort Worth in 1931, with mirrors fixed to his glasses and postcards at a quarter to pay his way, until Turkish police jailed him at the border and an American consul talked him into coming home from Istanbul. Guinness still lists the 8,000-mile trek as the longest walk ever made backwards.

When an ice storm shut down roads across the South in January 2026, Jeep clubs offered nurses free rides to work. In Longview, Texas, six Jeeps and Broncos made more than 200 trips, taking hospital staff to their shifts and home again. Every driver was a volunteer, and the hospital surprised them with gift cards for gas. One East Texas club has done it since the 2021 winter storm.

Willie Nelson helped start Farm Aid in 1985 to raise money for family farmers. In 1991 the government put his own 44-acre Texas ranch up for auction over back taxes. More than 40 farmers, some from South Dakota, came to the courthouse and asked bidders to stay away. A lawyer for a farm group bought the ranch and held it until Willie got it back. At 93, he played Farm Aid again in September.

Willie Nelson bought a Martin guitar sight unseen in 1969 and later named it Trigger. He has played it on stage ever since, and his pick has worn a hole clean through the top. An Austin luthier named Mark Erlewine has kept it playable since 1977, bracing the worn top so it can go back on the road. Willie is 93. On September 26 he closed Farm Aid on the same guitar.

A Texas ranch wife helped save the American bison. By 1878, hide hunters had nearly wiped out the southern herd. Mary Ann Goodnight urged her husband Charles to rescue a few orphaned calves. Those calves started one of five herds that seeded nearly every bison in North America. Their descendants still roam Caprock Canyons State Park, right through the campground.

After the 1900 Galveston hurricane wiped out the strawberry farms on the Texas mainland, Red Cross founder Clara Barton, 78, had her staff ask the growers what they needed. The answer was strawberry plants. Her workers ordered 1.5 million from nurseries in four states, and they were in the ground within two weeks. Pasadena, Texas, still holds a strawberry festival every May.

Reveille, Texas A&M's collie mascot, outranks every cadet on campus. She holds the rank of Cadet General, with five diamonds - the Corps Commander only wears four. It started in 1931, when cadets hit a stray dog near Navasota and hid her in the dorm. She barked at the bugler's reveille call the next morning, and the name stuck. The rule stands: if she falls asleep on a cadet's bed, that cadet sleeps on the floor.

In 1997, a 23-year-old French con artist convinced a Texas family he was their missing teenage son — despite having brown eyes instead of blue, a heavy French accent, and being a completely different person. He lived with them for months before a private investigator uncovered the truth.

Big Tex is the 55-foot cowboy who greets everyone at the State Fair of Texas. He wasn't always a cowboy. In 1949, tiny Kerens, Texas, built a 49-foot Santa Claus to save its Christmas shopping season. Dallas bought him in 1951 and turned him into a cowboy. He debuted in 1952 wearing size-70 boots and a 75-gallon hat. He's greeted fairgoers with "Howdy, folks!" since 1953.