The History of the Old Spanish Trail is as varied as the areas it crosses on its journey from Jacksonville FL to San Diego CA. In Texas, the OST has had many routes, but by 1921 a predominantly southern route from Orange to San Antonio to El Paso had been formalized. Source: The Development of Highways in Texas:
A Historic Context of the Bankhead Highway and Other Historic Named Highways, but the Texas Historical Commission
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visit link)
"The Old Spanish Trail largely overlapped with the “Southern National Highway,” as the route was named by the Texas Highway Commission in 1917. At that time, the agency formally incorporated the roadway as SH 3 in the new state highway system. (See Figure 183.) However, the route marked by the Old Spanish Trail Association included a wideranging variety of alignments other than SH 3; the most notable was the SH 27 alignments travelling through Kerrville, Sonora, and Junction en route to Fort Stockton.
Regardless of the name or designation used, the route quickly assumed a leading role in the state’s emerging highway system, in part, because it travelled to not only some of the state’s most important nodes of military installations (San Antonio) and industrial centers (the oil refineries in Houston and the Gold Triangle areas of Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Orange), but also some of the state’s best known tourist destinations, parks, and recreational centers, such as the Alamo and Balmorrhea State Park."
By 1926, when the US Federal Highway System converted the old names Auto Tour Routes into a numbered system of US Highways, the OST was well established. At this time, parts of the OST in Texas were co-designated US 90, US 90Alt, US 87, US 80 and US 290.
The OST in Fort Stockton was part of the US 290 alignment that terminated northwest of Balmorhea at US 80 (The Bankhead Highway).
In the 1930s, Fort Stockton had three US highways converging just east of its busy downtown: The US 290, the US 67, and the US 285. (Source: Old Highway Maps section of (
visit link) ). Travelers on the OST passed by this very spot, although at the time it was bereft of what would later make it famous.
In 1980, Fort Stockton Gene Cummings mobilized the community to build Paisano Pete on this wasted triangle of land where the three historic highways met.
So although Pete never brought smiles to the OST travelers "back in the day," he is located on the historic route of the OST through Fort Stockton, which used to be the US 290, then after 1983 was redesignated as the 1-10 Fort Stockton Business Loop, when the last part of I-10 was finished in Texas at Fort Stockton.
The first time Mama Blaster came to Fort Stockton as a child (1985), Paisano Pete was by himself in this triangular patch of land where the US 90, US 385, and the US 285 met. No mind that he was a little bare on a dusty triangle leftover scrap of land -- he was my first Big Fun Thing, and ever after, I have loved them all: The big concrete gophers near the Badlands in SD, the World's Largest Jackalope in Odessa TX, the World's Largest Killer Bee in Hidalgo TX, the Giant Milk Bottle along Route 66 in Oklahoma City, the Ginormous donut at Randy's Donuts In Inglewood CA, near LAX. There's just something about these Big Fun Things that are so tacky, and so wonderful.