McLean, Texas

McLean, in Gray County on the Texas Panhandle, was founded in nineteen oh one as a stop on the Rock Island Railroad and named for Judge William P. McLean of the Texas Railroad Commission. Route Sixty-Six brought the town its busiest decades as a shipping point for cattle and wheat, and McLean briefly thrived with nearly fifty businesses along the main street.

Then Interstate Forty bypassed it almost overnight, and the count dropped from forty-eight establishments to sixteen. One of the survivors became something unexpected: a former brassieres factory, where a hundred women worked for two decades making undergarments for Sears, reopened in nineteen ninety-one as the Devil's Rope Museum, the largest barbed wire museum in the world. The name comes from what ranchers and religious groups called the invention when it first appeared in the eighteen seventies, because it mangled livestock and people alike.

The museum now holds specimens of over two thousand distinct types of the wire that fenced the open range and, in doing so, ended the era of the long cattle drive.