Waxahachie: Gingerbread City, Vanished Super-Collider, and Hollywood's Favorite Backdrop

The small city you are passing through earned two nicknames that could not be more different from each other. One stuck. The other collapsed underground, literally.

Waxahachie was founded in eighteen fifty as the seat of Ellis County, on land donated by a pioneer settler named Emory Rogers. The name itself comes from a Waco word meaning "cow creek" or, by another reading, "buffalo creek," and the town grew steadily on cotton, cattle, and the commerce of a courthouse square. That courthouse, completed in eighteen ninety-seven and designed by the celebrated Texas architect James Riely Gordon, is one of the most photographed historic landmarks in the state after the Alamo. Built of red sandstone and pink granite in a richly ornamented Romanesque Revival style, it anchors a square ringed by Victorian homes with spindled porches and elaborate carved woodwork. The fanciful trim on those houses gave Waxahachie its first nickname: the Gingerbread City.

By the nineteen eighties, Hollywood had discovered what Ellis County residents already knew. The streets looked like a period film set straight out of the box. Director Robert Benton, a Waxahachie native, wrote the screenplay for Bonnie and Clyde in nineteen sixty-seven, using his hometown streets as locations. He returned in nineteen eighty-four to film Places in the Heart, a Depression-era story about a Texas widow that starred Sally Field and won Benton two Academy Awards. Tender Mercies, another Oscar winner, also shot scenes here. Three consecutive years, the mid-nineteen eighties, a film made in Waxahachie carried home at least one Oscar. The town collected twelve golden statuettes in all across those productions.

The second nickname almost happened. In nineteen eighty-eight the federal government chose Waxahachie as the site for the Superconducting Super Collider, the most ambitious physics project in American history. Workers began boring a tunnel fifty-four miles in circumference beneath the Ellis County limestone, designed to accelerate protons to twenty trillion electron volts and collide them with enough energy to probe the fundamental nature of matter. Physicists believed it would discover the Higgs boson a decade before any competing machine could. Two billion dollars had been spent and about one-quarter of the tunnel was finished when Congress cancelled the project in October of nineteen ninety-three. The unfinished tunnels still run beneath the fields south of town, sealed and silent. CERN's Large Hadron Collider eventually found the Higgs boson in two thousand twelve, almost nineteen years after the machine that could have gotten there first was abandoned right here.