Z. I. Hale Museum and Rock Hotel

Winters grew in Bluff Creek Valley from 1880, named for John N. Winters, a rancher and land agent who gave land for the first school. The railroad came in 1909, when the Abilene and Southern built an extension from Abilene, and the town incorporated that year with a cottonseed oil mill as its first industry.

The museum spreads across three buildings. The main one bears the name of Z. I. Hale, a local optometrist, whose office now holds rooms on early businesses, farming and ranching, schools and home life. Its collection of Ledbetter pressed-glass pitchers is said to be the second largest in the country, and the J. N. Winters room shows wedding dresses back to 1904. A music room covers the area's musical heritage.

The Rock Hotel, built in 1909 for railroad travelers, has a restored 1920s honeymoon suite and a room for Rogers Hornsby, born on his father's Hereford ranch near Winters on April 27, 1896. The St. Louis Cardinals bought his contract for $500 in 1915, and he became one of the great right-handed hitters in baseball. The third building, the 1927 dealership of local farmer and inventor Gus Pruser, holds early farm implements and the horse-drawn cotton-picking machine Pruser invented in 1912.