Magnolia Station, Vega

Vega is a ranch and wheat town whose name is Spanish for meadow or plain. N. J. Whitfield bought the townsite in 1899, the Choctaw, Oklahoma and Texas Railroad took a right of way across the county in 1903, and that May the town was surveyed. The railroad was finished in 1909 and the town grew. In 1915 Vega won a five-year fight to take the county seat away from Tascosa, and county business was done in the Oldham Hotel until a courthouse was built.

Route 66 ran through on its way between Amarillo and Adrian, and tourist courts and stations lined it. The Magnolia station on Main Street, built in the 1920s, sold gasoline until 1953 and then housed a barbershop until 1965, and it fell into serious decline. With a National Park Service cost-share grant, the town repaired the doors, windows, roof shingles, plaster and floors, rebuilt the canopy over the pump island and reproduced the pump.

It is now an interpretive stop in the courthouse district. Down the old road, the 1947 Vega Motel still operates as a historic motel.