Eastland, Texas, Old Rip

Eastland, seat of Eastland County, made national news in nineteen twenty-eight over a horned lizard. Back in eighteen ninety-seven, county clerk Ernest Wood had a theory that horned lizards could hibernate for decades. To test it, he placed a live horned toad into the sealed cornerstone vault of a new courthouse, along with a Bible, newspapers, and coins.

Thirty-one years later, when a new courthouse required demolishing the old one, a crowd of well over a thousand gathered to watch the cornerstone opened on February eighteenth, nineteen twenty-eight. Out came the lizard, dusty and flat but, according to the witnesses, alive and wriggling. He was renamed Old Rip, after Rip Van Winkle, became a national celebrity, and was presented to President Calvin Coolidge at the White House.

Old Rip died eleven months later, but his preserved body still rests in a small velvet-lined casket inside the current Eastland County Courthouse.