The outdoors
Hunt, fish, paddle, hike — by the book.
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Texas Porch
Pull up a chair. Texas gets easier from here.
Answers, useful tools, and local notes for 1,200+ Texas places and all 254 counties — with the official source on every page.
Try Travis County, homestead exemption, Corsicana, or dove season.
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Start with the part of Texas life that brought you here.
Home & money
The money side of Texas life.
Property tax, buying a home, land, insurance, and vehicles, explained plainly with calculators where they help.
Open Home & Money →Places
1,200+ Texas places and all 254 counties.
Find the local offices, nearby places, county notes, and useful context for where you live or where you are headed.
Find a Texas place →Porch Stories
The details that make Texas places themselves.
Courthouse squares, oil booms, old rail towns, rivers, foodways, and civic oddities — short, true, sourced stories.
Read Porch Stories →From the porch
A few Texas stories worth sitting with.
Local history and place details, written to explain why a street, landscape, or community feels the way it does.
Corsicana · Navarro County
Corsicana's brick streets are part of the downtown story
Downtown Corsicana has an official Main Street program, old brick streets, and a restored railroad freight office that keeps the center of town readable on foot.
Polly · Bandera County
Polly's Chapel Keeps a Tejano Frontier Story in Stone
Polly's Chapel ties a rural Bandera County place to Policarpo Rodriguez, a Texas Ranger, Army scout, guide, and 1858 settler.
Bailey County
Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge Draws Tens of Thousands of Sandhill Cranes Each Winter
Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge, established in 1935 and described by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as the oldest national wildlife refuge in Texas, sits 20 miles south of Muleshoe and hosts large concentrations of sandhill cranes during winter.
Useful right now
Homestead The school homestead exemption is now $140,000 For a qualifying residence homestead, the school-tax taxable value starts much lower than market value. Appeals The protest deadline is usually May 15 or 30 days after notice The deadline is easy to miss because it is tied to the appraisal notice. Vehicles Most Texas cars no longer need the old safety inspection The registration bill still has inspection-related wrinkles.
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