Glenrio, Texas

01A Railroad Town with Two State Lines

Glenrio began life in 1903 as a humble siding called Rock Island, named for the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railway that built the line across the Texas Panhandle. In 1908 the railroad rechristened it Glenrio, a hybrid coined from Scots "glen" (valley) and Spanish "rio" (river), reflecting the bilingual frontier it served. The town's most peculiar feature was geographic: the state line ran straight through the settlement, putting half the buildings in Deaf Smith County, Texas, and half in Quay County, New Mexico. That accident of surveying would shape almost everything that happened in Glenrio for the next century.

The first post office opened on the New Mexico side, but mail was dropped at the railroad depot on the Texas side, an early hint of the cross-border choreography to come. Original buildings were adobe, including the circa-1910 Angel House on the New Mexico side. For its first decade Glenrio was simply a place where freight got loaded and water tanks got filled.

02How Route 66 Made and Unmade the Town

Motorists first rolled through in 1917 on the dusty Ozark Trail, and on November 11, 1926, that wagon-track became U.S. Route 66. Glenrio sat at a meaningful spot on the new highway: the first or last Texas town a westbound or eastbound driver would see, depending on direction. By the 1930s, filling stations, cafes, and tourist courts lined the roadway. Two surviving structures from the postwar boom anchor the Historic District today: the Texaco station built in 1950 and the Brownlee Diner, later known as the Little Juarez Cafe, built in 1952. Both are streamlined art moderne, all curved parapets and porcelain enamel, the kind of architecture meant to be read at 55 miles an hour.

The state line drove the town's economy in unexpected ways. Gasoline was pumped on the Texas side because New Mexico levied a higher fuel tax. The State Line Bar and the motel, however, were built in New Mexico, because Deaf Smith County, Texas, was dry. Travelers could fill their tank in one state, walk a hundred feet, and order a beer in another. Hollywood took note: portions of John Ford's 1940 adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath were reportedly filmed here, and Glenrio's weather-beaten motel later helped inspire the abandoned roadside architecture in Pixar's Cars (2006).

The blow came in September 1973, when Interstate 40 opened a bypass two miles to the south. Traffic vanished almost overnight. The railroad pulled up its tracks in the 1980s, the post office eventually closed, and by 1985 only two residents reportedly remained. The 2010 census recorded a population of zero.

03Can You Visit Glenrio Today?

Yes, and the visit is unusually rewarding for a ghost town this complete. From Interstate 40, take Exit 0 in Texas (or Exit 369 in New Mexico) and follow the old Route 66 frontage onto what becomes a county-maintained gravel road at the state line. The Glenrio Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2007, contains 12 contributing buildings and four other structures spread across 31.7 acres straddling the border. The Texaco station, the Little Juarez Cafe, the State Line Motel, and the famous double-sided "Last Motel in Texas / First Motel in Texas" sign are all standing, though weathered.

The land is privately and state-owned and visitors should stay on the public roadway and respect "no trespassing" notices. There is no entry fee, no visitor center, and almost no shade. The single active business in town is a cannabis dispensary on the New Mexico side, where recreational sale is legal, an oddly fitting twenty-first-century echo of Glenrio's century-long tradition of arbitraging the state line.

04What Remains of Glenrio Today

What remains is, by ghost town standards, extraordinary: a continuous stretch of pre-Interstate Route 66 with its mid-century commercial architecture largely intact and unrestored. The Texaco canopy still throws a sharp shadow over cracked concrete. The Little Juarez Cafe's curved facade still faces the empty highway. The motel rooms still have numbers on the doors. There are no reconstructed exhibits and no costumed interpreters, only the buildings themselves, fading at the pace the High Plains wind allows. For travelers driving the surviving segments of the Mother Road, Glenrio is one of the few places where the highway looks much as it did the day the bypass opened and the cars stopped coming.