TXTexas Fun Facts

El Paso is closer to San Diego than it is to Houston, and it keeps a different clock than the rest of the state. Texas is wide enough that the far west corner has more in common with New Mexico than with the Gulf coast 750 miles away.

Facts most people get wrong

• Texas cannot legally secede. The Supreme Court settled it in Texas v. White in 1869, ruling that the state's entry into the Union was final. The related myth about splitting into five states comes from the 1845 annexation resolution, which allowed up to four additional states to be carved out, but only with the consent of Congress.
• The flag height rule is not real. No federal law lets Texas fly its flag level with the United States flag as a special privilege. Under the Flag Code any state may fly its flag at the same height on a separate pole, and on a shared pole the national flag goes on top everywhere, Texas included.
• The Alamo was a mission, not a fort. It was founded in 1718 as Mission San Antonio de Valero. Even the famous curved gable on the front was not there during the 1836 battle. The United States Army added it around 1850.
• The Apollo 13 quote is misremembered. The actual transmission was Houston, we've had a problem, said first by Jack Swigert and then repeated by Jim Lovell. The past tense version is the one in the flight recordings.
• Texas is not all desert. The Piney Woods in the southeast are genuinely wet. The Beaumont and Port Arthur area averages far more rain in a year than Seattle does.
• The capitol is not a copy of the national one. Finished in 1888 out of Texas pink granite, the Austin building stands about 302 feet, taller than the United States Capitol in Washington.

Records and firsts

• Texas was an independent country from 1836 to 1845, recognized by the United States, France and Britain, before it joined the Union as the 28th state.
• The first word spoken from the surface of the Moon was Houston. Neil Armstrong's transmission opened with the call sign of mission control at the Manned Spacecraft Center.
• King Ranch, founded in 1853 near Kingsville, covers roughly 825,000 acres, more land than the entire state of Rhode Island.
• Texas has 254 counties, more than any other state, and more than 300,000 miles of public road.
• Dr Pepper was mixed in Waco in 1885 at Morrison's Old Corner Drug Store, one year before Coca-Cola.
• Texas produces more crude oil than any other state and also generates more electricity from wind than any other state, a lead it has held since 2006.
• Big Thicket in southeast Texas became the first national preserve in the country in 1974.

Geography that surprises

• Texas stretches about 801 miles north to south and 773 miles east to west, so a drive from Texarkana to El Paso is longer than a drive from Texarkana to Chicago.
• El Paso and Hudspeth counties sit on Mountain time. The other 252 counties are on Central.
• Brownsville at the southern tip sits at roughly the same latitude as Miami, which is why palms and citrus grow in the Rio Grande Valley.
• The state has 367 miles of Gulf coastline, most of it shielded by barrier islands including Padre Island, one of the longest in the world.
• Texarkana straddles the Arkansas line, and the federal courthouse and post office there was built directly on the boundary, with one half in each state.

Where the name comes from

Texas comes from a Caddo word, written by the Spanish as tejas or teyshas, meaning friends or allies. Caddo speakers used it as a greeting toward allied groups, and Spanish explorers in the late 1600s took it for the name of the people and then the land.

That etymology is the reason the official state motto is a single word, Friendship, adopted in 1930. Six flags have flown over the territory since: Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the Confederacy and the United States.

State basics

Bordering states

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