Boise, Texas: The Panhandle Ghost That Never Quite Formed

Boise was a railroad shipping point on the Rock Island line, just south of the old Route Sixty-Six alignment through the Texas Panhandle, west of Amarillo in Oldham County, where the highway crossed the Llano Estacado. The settlement existed to ship cattle and serve the ranching operations scattered across the high plains grassland, but it never grew into a real town. Unlike some Route Sixty-Six communities that were killed by the interstate bypasses of the nineteen fifties and sixties, Boise was always marginal, the kind of place that appeared on maps because someone had to mark it.

The Texas Panhandle section of Route Sixty-Six runs through one of the flattest and most exposed landscapes the highway crosses, the caprock edge where the elevation tops out around four thousand feet and the wind runs unobstructed for a hundred miles. What survives of old Boise is not much. What survives of the landscape around it is everything.