Judge Roy Bean Visitor Center

Langtry began in 1882 as a grading camp for the Southern Pacific near the Eagle Nest crossing of the Rio Grande, and it is named for George Langtry, an engineer and foreman who supervised a Chinese work crew building the line. Roy Bean, a saloonkeeper from San Antonio, reached the camp at Vinegarroon, just west of the Pecos, in July 1882. The Texas Rangers needed a justice of the peace closer than the county seat at Fort Stockton, a 400-mile round trip, and on August 2 the Pecos County commissioners appointed him. He held the office, with two interruptions, until he retired in 1902.

Bean said he named the town for the English actress Lillie Langtry; the railroad records say otherwise, but he did name his saloon the Jersey Lilly for her. His rulings made him famous, and some were cruel. When a track worker killed a Chinese laborer, with the killer's friends ready to riot, Bean ruled that his law book did not make it a crime. In 1896 he staged the Fitzsimmons-Maher heavyweight fight on a sandbar on the Mexican side of the river, where the Rangers had no jurisdiction. He died in the saloon on March 16, 1903. Lillie Langtry visited the next year.

The state took over the saloon in 1934 and restored it in 1939, and TxDOT runs the visitor center beside it. The center is under construction: the Jersey Lilly, the opera house and the cactus and butterfly gardens are temporarily closed, but the lobby and restrooms stay open.