Groom, Texas

Groom is a small Carson County town on the Texas Panhandle, founded in nineteen oh two along the Rock Island Railroad and named after Colonel B.B. Groom, a cattle baron who ran one of the great Panhandle ranching operations of the late eighteen hundreds.

The town grew as a shipping point for cattle and grain, and Route Sixty-Six pushed traffic through its main street for decades. But what draws drivers off Interstate Forty today is something visible from twenty miles out: a one-hundred-and-ninety-foot steel cross erected in nineteen ninety-five. It is often billed as one of the largest crosses in the Western Hemisphere.

Construction took about eight months. At its base stand life-sized bronze statues depicting the Stations of the Cross. The cross was built by a local ministry, and it has turned a quiet farming town into a pilgrimage site for travelers from far beyond the Panhandle.

It stands eighteen feet shorter than the two hundred eight foot cross in Saint Augustine, Florida, and the life sized statues around its base depict the fourteen Stations of the Cross. Groom has another landmark beside the interstate, the Leaning Tower of Britten, an old water tower that Ralph Britten bought and moved to serve as a sign for his truck stop. It stands on a stretch of Interstate Forty that was once part of Route Sixty-Six.

As for the man the town is named for, in eighteen eighty two Colonel Groom leased about five hundred ninety three thousand acres of Panhandle land, but his Francklyn Land and Cattle Company went insolvent in eighteen eighty six.