Almost anything you would need while traveling the Old Spanish Trail in the 1920s-1950s you could find here at the Old Mercantile Store on Main Street (the OST) in downtown Sonora. The town lawyers and its doctor had offices on the 2nd floor. The first floor sold a wide range of goods, since it was the predominant retail store in town.
After being vacant for almost half a century (from the late 1950s-mid 2000s), the Old Mercantile Building is again open for business as a collection of specialty, antique, and gift shops. See: Armer & Andi's at (
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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, by the Texas Historical Commission
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"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 traveled 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 that passed through Sonora on Main and Water Streets was part of the US 290 alignment that terminated northwest of Balmorhea at US 80 (The Bankhead Highway).