Rancho Nixon Historical Association sets park grand opening

The Rancho Nixon Historical Association will hold a park grand opening at the new historical park on Texas 80, one mile north of Nixon, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, April 22.

The event will feature historic displays, including two cowboys singing around a campfire, as well as chuckwagons and mounted cowboys roaming through the park to celebrate the area’s role as origin point of the American quarter horse and the probable origin of the American cowboy, who descended from the Spanish vaqueros.

Rancho Nixon Historical Association founder Donald Hoffman has previously said the organization has spent nearly $200,000 in private donations to develop the historical park.

The organization also entered into a 10-year lease in March 2022 with the City of Nixon to turn the former Nixon Police Department building at 106 W. Third St. into a future museum site to chronicle the history of Nixon and its predecessor, the Rancho Community, which existed about a mile or so north of present-day Nixon until its post office closed in 1911.

There are an additional 156 Texas historical markers erected in the area, including 31 which are about famed gunslinger John Wesley Hardin, who practiced law in the Gonzales and Nixon area in the 1890s after he was released from jail.