Kylie Frey to Sing at July 4th Celebration

Kylie Frey

Country singer Kylie Frey will be one of the performers at this year’s free concert and street dance in downtown Roscoe on July 4th.

She’ll be opening for Red Dirt singer Jason Boland. The all-star lineup now consists of her, Jason Boland, and Lyndall Underwood, who will also be at the Lumberyard following the fireworks.

A former rodeo queen with multiple championships, Kylie Frey is a native of Opelousas, Louisiana, now living in Nashville. Her debut album included two Top Tens and her first number 1, “Rodeo Man,” on Texas Regional Radio Report Charts. She’s also been a contestant on the USA channel’s Real Country.

Notable singles by her include “Rodeo Man,” “One Night,” “Me and These Boots,” “The Chase,” and “Too Bad,” with Randy Rogers.

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TEXAS HITS NEW HIGHS WITH COVID-19 DEATHS, HOSPITALIZATIONS

Texas now has had 2,029 deaths from Covid-19 and yesterday reached a total of 2,518 hospitalizations. Both are new records, as the number of overall positives for the virus also continues to rise. However, Governor Greg Abbott is staying the course with his reopenings, saying that there are still plenty of hospital beds available. Even so, the number of people hospitalized has been rising rapidly and is up 43% for the state since the first of the month.

Locally, the numbers aren’t so drastic as the number of active cases remains low. Abilene got its first hospitalization since June 7 this week but still has only 9 active cases, which is very low for a city of its size. Scurry County still has 26 active cases, and Big Spring also saw a jump with Howard County’s 14 new cases over the previous week.

In Nolan County, the good news is that the Nolan County Health Department reported that of the 6 positive tests reported week before last, 5 were negative on retesting, leaving only 1, a prison employee. The bad news is that Nolan County is reporting 2 new cases this week, making for 3 active cases. Still, compared to what’s happening in places like Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio, we can feel good that this area is still relatively free of the virus.

Here are the numbers for this week as of yesterday:

Abilene has 259 positive results for the year with only 9 active cases and 1 hospitalization.

These are the area’s county figures as of yesterday (with last week’s in parentheses if different): Jones, 630 (637); Brown, 61 (59); Scurry, 28 (26); Howard, 23 (9); Comanche, 14 (12); Callahan, 13 (10); Eastland, 7; Stephens, 5 (4); Nolan 5 (7); Coke, 4 (1); Haskell, 4 (3); Coleman, 3;Runnels, 2 (3); Fisher, 2; Mitchell 2 (1); Knox, 1; Shackelford, 1.

Selected west Texas counties yesterday (with last Tuesday’s count in parentheses): Lubbock, 894 (741); Ector (Odessa), 260 (187); Midland, 222 (155); Tom Green (San Angelo), 121 (78); Wichita (Wichita Falls), 117 (87).

Texas now has 93,206 (74,978 cases last Tuesday), 30,496 of them active, and 2,029 deaths (1,830 last Tuesday).

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WEATHER REPORT: AN UNEVENTFUL WEATHER WEEK

Yesterday's clouds.

We have just lived through one of the most uneventful weeks imaginable regarding June weather for west Texas. Every day of the past week was sunny or mostly sunny with a high somewhere between 91° and 94°, a low between 64° and 71°, and winds from the south or southeast between 5-15mph with gusts up to 25—and no precipitation or even a chance for any.

But of course that’s the problem. We do need some weather events, particularly the kind involving precipitation. It’s June, which historically has always been one of the top three months regarding precipitation along with May and September. This year, May turned out to be a total loss, and so far, June is shaping up to be the same.

Today and tomorrow are forecast to continue the string of uneventful days with today’s high reaching 93° with a low of 71° and tomorrow’s high 94° and low 70° with winds from the south both days of around 20mph.

Friday, however, has one significant difference. It will be cloudier and have a 40% chance of precipitation, so there is at least a chance something different may happen. All the other days for the coming week have a maximum chance of only 20%. You’d think that five days in a row of 20% chances would mean you’d get at least one rain (5 x 20% = 100%), but apparently that’s not the way it works, not in west Texas anyway.

Starting on Sunday, the highs will climb to between 95° and 100° with precipitation chances dropping to 10% or 20%. And that pattern will hold for the first half of next week.

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ROSCOE IN YEARS GONE BY: HIGHWAY BYPASSES AND THE DECLINE OF THE BUSINESS DISTRICT

Downtown Roscoe before the bypasses, 1949

Editor’s note: This article began as a review and comment on two or three articles published in the Dallas Morning News in 1987 that used Roscoe as an example of the rural farming communities in west Texas that were declining and in danger of dying. And I may do a follow-up to this one that makes it that. But this is as far as I got this week, so the following article focuses on what happened when the bypasses were built. In most towns this happened only once, but in Roscoe it happened twice, each time making a deep impact on the community and its residents.

Two major events over a twenty-year span were the principle reasons for the decline of Roscoe’s business district. The first was the building of Interstate 20 in the late 1950s that re-routed all through traffic of the old US Highway 80 around Roscoe. The second was the construction of the US 84 Roscoe bypass in the late 1970s that did the same for the through traffic on US 84.

Since the beginnings of the town in the 1890s, Roscoe had always been on the main southern route across the country from east to west. Before it existed and before the Texas & Pacific railroad was built in 1881, an old unnamed Indian trail went from one water source to the next. In the 1870s, when the Texas & Pacific planned its railroad from east Texas to El Paso, it surveyed three possible routes from Dallas to El Paso and decided on the one that followed the old Indian trail. It called it the Center Line Trail because it was the middle of the three surveyed routes. The same trail was used by buffalo hunters after the Civil War, and when Captain E. B. McBurnett came west in 1880 from Eastland to deliver feed for the surveyors’ mules near what is now Westbrook, he also followed the Center Line Trail, mentioning that it had been used by men from the south headed west to the California gold rush 30 years earlier.

After the railroad was built on the Center Line Trail in 1881, a wagon road developed that ran roughly alongside the railroad tracks, and after the turn of the twentieth century when motorized vehicles began making their appearance, it was officially named Texas Highway 1 and ran from Texarkana to El Paso. In Roscoe, it was originally called First Street and was where the downtown business section developed. The main businesses moved east about a half-mile after a flood in 1894 but always ran along First Street, serving both the local population as well as the people who were just passing through.

As motor vehicles replaced wagons, the highway was frequently improved and upgraded, traffic increased, and local businesses that catered to it sprang up along the highway. These included filling stations, garages, hotels, tourist courts, cafés, groceries, and drug stores. As time went by, Texas Highway 1 became a part of the Bankhead Highway that went from coast to coast and was the first year-round transcontinental highway in the country, and the Bankhead in turn later became US Highway 80.

Roscoe was a thriving community and a transportation hub, connecting two railroads, the T&P and the RS&P, and two highways, Highway 80 and US Highway 84, originally Texas Highway 7, running from Roscoe through Snyder into the Texas panhandle. Although Roscoe was always a farming and ranching community, much of its economy was based on its businesses that also served the traveling public.

In the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower was the chief proponent for a network of superhighways that could be used both for public transportation and, in times of crisis or invasion, by the military for quick, unimpeded travel. These new multilane highways were modeled on the German autobahns developed in the 1930s to move troops and military equipment quickly from one part of Germany to another. Known in the US as the Interstate Highway System, they were designed to bypass towns where stop-and-go local traffic impeded quick movement across long distances.

Highway 80 was converted to Interstate 20 and completed locally in 1958 when two new lanes were added from the T&P overpass just this side of the Midway Drive-In to the four-lane bypass just south of Roscoe that connected to the four lanes that already ran between Roscoe and Loraine. The cost for this 5.3 mile stretch was approximately $1,400,000. Its effects were immediately felt by the local businesses along the old Highway 80. The motels lost business along with most of the filling stations and eating establishments on Broadway.

The new four-lane highway also made travel to Sweetwater and Abilene easier, and as time went on, more local residents went to Sweetwater and Abilene to do their shopping, and local businesses suffered. In just a few years, for example, the number of grocery stores in Roscoe went from over a half dozen scattered around town to three, then two, and then only one, the Town & Country on Main Street. Hardware and furniture stores also saw dwindling sales and eventually closed.

However, traffic on US 84 to and from the panhandle and cities east of Roscoe continued to come through Roscoe. It was good for places like the Dairy Fluff, Haney’s Drugs, and Smitty’s Steak House, along with the filling stations and garages on Broadway. But as traffic increased, the downtown area became noisier and more congested, and the 90 degree turn at the traffic light at Broadway and Cypress created a constant bottleneck. Traffic was also often held up by passing and switching trains on the railroad tracks, and the number of accidents there increased.

In October 1969, the Texas Highway Commission held a public hearing in Roscoe about a proposed bypass of the town, but the local citizens opposed it, and nothing was done. However, as the traffic situation downtown only got worse, the desire for a solution increased.

Three and a half years later in March 1973, Roscoe mayor Clyde Jay appealed to the Texas Highway Commission for another public hearing, saying that sentiment in Roscoe had changed, and a different result could now be expected. Correspondence with the Commission in the following months indicated support in Roscoe for the project, and in September a delegation from Roscoe and Abilene went to Austin and appeared before the Commission to request the relocation of US 84 at Roscoe.

The group from Abilene favored the bypass because businesses there wanted a “Port-to-Plains” highway that would be a four-lane expressway running from Houston through Abilene and the Texas plains to the panhandle. The Roscoe delegation included Mayor Clyde Jay, also representing the City Council; Glen Pitts of the RS&P; Glen Madison of the Roscoe Civic Improvement Association; and Harold Haynes, president of the School Board.

In its approval of the bypass, the Texas Highway Commission received supporting letters from the Nolan County Judge, the Mayor of Roscoe, the Roscoe Civic Improvement Association, and the West Central Texas Council of Governments.

The Commission’s environmental impact statement listed as positive the “relieving of noise, congestion, and danger of highway traffic through town, and the increased capacity and safety of a four-lane connector around Roscoe to Interstate 20.” The adverse effects would be “the loss of revenue to local businesses from cross-country traffic, and the conversion of 150 acres of fertile farm land from agricultural production.”

Bypassed businesses affected were listed as the Mobil, Standard, Shamrock, and Texaco service stations, McFaul’s and Jesse’s Garages, the Drive-In Grocery Store, the Dairy Fluff Drive-In, and the Criswell Motel. The total estimated cost of the project was $4,864,500.

Downtown Roscoe after the bypasses, mid-1980s.

Ultimately, there was no good solution. If nothing was done, traffic on US 84 would continue to increase, and the downtown bottleneck could only get worse. There were already over 3,000 vehicles per day in downtown Roscoe, and the previous year had seen over a dozen accidents. So, something had to be done, but it came with a cost. The solution eventually resulted in the gutting of the downtown Roscoe business district, and by the mid-1980s, the once thriving downtown was a collection of empty and collapsing buildings.

The traffic light at Cypress and Broadway became a flashing stoplight, and even it was eventually replaced by a stop sign. The Texas Highway Commission’s impact statement assumed that several of the businesses on Broadway would relocate along the bypass and others would survive by serving the local population, but neither occurred. Some of the businesses did hang on for a while, Kirby Smith’s, Chubby & Mac’s, and Pat Vines’s stations, McFaul’s and Jesse Faust’s garages, and the Dairy Fluff all continued to operate for varying periods of time, but eventually all of them (except McFaul’s Garage) closed never to return. The same was true of the downtown drug stores, Haney’s and Glen Madison’s, and downtown restaurants, such as the Coffee Bar and Smitty’s Steak House.

The business district that had once been the town’s most active area was reduced to the point that the town was used as an example of the dying rural communities of west Texas in a feature series in the Dallas Morning News in 1987.

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References

“$3.5 Million U.S. 80 Jobs Slated for Bids Tuesday,” Abilene Reporter-News, January 19, 1957.

“Roscoe Asks for Bypass,” Abilene Reporter-News, March 9, 1973.

“Area Group Will Press for Bypass,” Abilene Reporter-News, September 2, 1973.

US-84 Interchange and Improvements, Roscoe: Environmental Impact Statement. Federal Highway Administration and Texas Highway Department. August 15, 1974.

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