“The best stretches of road for the Bankhead are west from Fort Worth to Strawn,” says Dan L. Smith, a champion of Bankhead preservation and author of the guide
Texas Highway No. 1 The Bankhead Highway in Texas. “It doesn’t get much better than that, but you have to know what you are looking for.”
Wanting to learn more, I asked Smith to help me devise a daytrip that would provide insight about the dawn of Texas highway travel in the early 20th century. Our history lesson begins in Weatherford, off I-20 in Weatherford, where East Bankhead Drive references the old highway’s namesake. U.S. Sen. John H. Bankhead of Alabama had promoted the idea of a southern path for a national highway, a route that would traverse his home state and would avoid the winter travel hazards of the Midwest and Rockies.