If you drive around Texas, you'll see no shortage of cities with unusual names. There's Klondike and Muleshoe; Bacon and Egypt. But does the Henderson County city's name have anything to do with actual guns or barrels?
"The reason why it was called Gun Barrel Lane is because that road was as straight as a gun barrel, which is kind of silly and simple, but that's just what they came up with," said Brooke Atkinson, the city planner for Gun Barrel City. "So they decided to petition the county and form a city called Gun Barrel City."
And despite a name that sounds straight out of the Wild West, Gun Barrel City actually wasn't incorporated until the late 1960s, when Cedar Creek Lake was finished.
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"During the summer months, we have such a large amount of people coming through our city just visiting," Atkinson said. "You can always tell like holiday weekends and summer months. I mean, our towns are packed with people visiting the lake."
We also check in on Muleshoe in the Texas Panhandle. Retired English teacher Alice Liles took up writing about the city as a second career, chronicling Muleshoe's history.
"There was a little drive-in hamburger place here called the Dairy Delite, and it was home of the Hershey burger," Liles said. "The woman who ran it came up with the idea of putting a Hershey bar in the middle of a cinnamon roll and then eating it. And that was a big delicacy."
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Liles also taught one of Muleshoe's most prominent celebrities: USC head football coach Lincoln Riley.
When Lincoln shows up, he's a big deal," she said. "And he brought a lot of people to Muleshoe to find out about him and to learn about him. So he kind of helped put us on the map too."
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