Adrian, Texas

Adrian, Texas carries an unusual distinction: it is the precise midpoint of Route Sixty-Six, sitting eleven hundred and thirty-nine miles from both Chicago and Los Angeles. The town got its start in nineteen hundred when a Rock Island Railroad survey picked the site as a water stop west of Amarillo. The first settler was Calvin Aten, a former Texas Ranger who dug a dugout on the Llano Estacado and waited for the railroad to catch up.

The town was named for Adrian Cullen, an early local farmer, and began to take proper shape in nineteen oh nine when the Chicago, Rock Island and Gulf Railway completed its run through Oldham County. A roadside diner opened here in nineteen twenty-eight, a full decade before Route Sixty-Six was even paved through this stretch of the Panhandle. In nineteen ninety-five the owner received a call from the Route Sixty-Six Association confirming the mileage math, and she renamed the place the Midpoint Cafe.

The sign out front tells drivers they are exactly halfway home, whichever direction they are headed.