10/14/2026
Texas has an entire class of highway that exists because farmers got tired of hauling cotton through mud. 🛻 They are called Farm to Market roads, and roughly half of all the state maintained highway mileage in Texas is made up of them.
The idea took hold in the 1940s. Get the back country out of the mud, pave a connection from the fields to the nearest town with a market or a rail depot, and do it one road at a time, county by county, until the whole state was stitched together. What came out of it is a web of narrow two lane blacktop with numbers instead of names, running between fence lines and over cattle guards to places that never grew big enough for an interstate. Texas maintains more highway miles than any other state in the country, and a great deal of that mileage is exactly this.
Those roads also happen to be the best part of driving here. No billboards. No merging. A low bridge over a dry creek with somebody's initials pressed into the concrete in 1963. You come over a rise and there is nothing on the other side but more of it. 🌾 An interstate gets you there on time. An FM road is the reason you leave two hours early.
