The Best Things to Do in Bonham, Texas

Sam Rayburn represented this district in Congress for 48 years and held the Speaker's gavel for 17 of them, longer than anyone before him. He built this house in 1916 and kept it as his home for the rest of his life. What makes it worth the drive is that the rooms hold his own furnishings, photographs and personal belongings, arranged the way he left them, rather than the generic period pieces most house museums settle for.

The Texas Historical Commission runs the site. You walk the house yourself with a staff member alongside, on tours that leave at the top of each hour. Admission is $6 for adults, $5 for seniors and veterans, $4 for ages 6 to 17, free under 6, and $12 for a family ticket. The grounds are free to walk during operating hours.

It went up in 1888 and 1889 in rough cut limestone hauled from Gober, designed in the Second Empire style by Waco architect Wesley Clark Dodson and laid up by two Scottish born stonemasons. A New Year's Eve fire in 1929 took the clock tower and the roof, which were replaced with a flat top, and in 1965 the county wrapped the whole building in smooth Lueders stone. For most of living memory this was a plain block on the square.

Fannin County voters approved a $12.5 million restoration bond in November 2016, the Texas Historical Commission added a matching grant through its courthouse preservation program, and a four year, $27.8 million rebuild put the stonework and the clock tower back. Hundreds of people stood on the square on 10 March 2022 to watch the tower clock strike ten at the rededication. Public radio station KETR reported the following year that the building had become a draw in its own right.

This is the other half of the Rayburn story, and it is free. The museum is a division of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin, which keeps his papers here. The centerpiece is a replica of the formal office of the Speaker of the House, which Rayburn used as his meeting room when he was home in Bonham, down to the silver and crystal chandelier that hung in the White House from the Grant administration through Theodore Roosevelt's.

One caveat worth knowing before you go. The museum has a capital improvement project under way covering drainage and foundation repair, both entrances and the landscaping. The public exhibits stay open through it, but the temporary exhibit space has been turned into staff offices, so there are no traveling exhibits at the moment and the museum is sitting out Bonham's annual Quilt Hop.

The North Texas Municipal Water District started impounding water here on 14 April 2021 and opened the 16,641 acre lake to the public on 17 April 2024. There are three public access areas with seven launch ramps between them, plus day use picnic areas, restrooms and roughly 50 parking spaces apiece. Launching is free, which is unusual for a lake this size.

Texas Parks and Wildlife stocked it from the start, including selectively bred Lonestar largemouth from the Toyota ShareLunker program, along with channel catfish, bluegill, crappie and white bass. A new reservoir with no fishing pressure history is a rare thing, and that is what people are driving up here for.

The museum fills twelve rooms of the restored 1900 Texas and Pacific depot with Native American artifacts, fossils, farm tools, quilts and furniture, railroad material, vintage clothing and county documents. A World War II room holds a restored Fairchild PT-19, the open cockpit trainer flown by the airmen who learned at Jones Field north of town, and there is a fire museum in the building as well.

The room most visitors remember is the one on Charlie Christian, who was born in Bonham on 29 July 1916 and whose family left for Oklahoma City in the fall of 1918. He went on to the Benny Goodman Sextet and is credited by musicologists as the man who made the electric guitar a solo instrument. The Handbook of Texas covers him. The museum keeps a permanent exhibit on his life and music, and it is the only place in his birthplace that does.

The state took the land from the city in 1933 and the park opened in 1936. Civilian Conservation Corps crews built the dam that holds the 65 acre lake, along with the buildings, bridges and picnic tables that are still in use across the 261 acres. The park normally offers 8.75 miles of hiking and biking trail, including the 2.7 mile Bois d'Arc Trail that runs past the CCC work. Entry is $4 for adults and free for children 12 and under.

Go in with current expectations, because the park's own alert page has been busy. The trails were posted closed for unsafe conditions on 3 February 2026 and had not reopened as of this writing. The lake has carried a hydrilla alert since 1 September 2025, which affects swimming, fishing and boating, and staff are working on control. A burn ban has been in effect since 11 August 2026 with charcoal allowed only in the standing grills, and a one way traffic pattern went in on 24 November 2025.

You drive your own vehicle through the paddocks and feed the animals from the car, then park and walk the rest, which includes a raised giraffe platform, a petting area and a walk through section the park calls Texas Down Under. Llamas, alpacas, camels and nilgai are among what you will meet on foot. Admission is sold at the gate rather than online and includes a cup of feed per ticket.

Worth saying plainly, because this list holds everything to the same standard. The public record for this one is thinner than for the rest. It carries a Bonham street address, a working phone and a Fannin County chamber directory listing, and it turns up in the regional Texoma travel guides, but we found no newspaper coverage of it, and two spellings of its web address circulate. Everything above it here is documented by a state agency, a university or a news outlet.

Bailey Inglish put up a log blockhouse and stockade on this ground in 1837, and the settlement that formed around it became Bonham. The replica you walk through was built in 1976 as a Fannin County Bicentennial project. Inside the stockade there is a broom making operation, a water well, an outhouse, a carriage house, a corn shelling and grinding area and a clothes washing setup.

Three original log cabins from the area were moved here and furnished, one as a general store, one as a typical 1830s cabin and one as the Inez Inglish cabin. There is no admission charge and donations are welcome. School and bus groups book through the Sam Rayburn House at (903) 583-5558, and an on site number, (903) 277-5015, also circulates.

A project of the Fannin Community Foundation, the center runs a fine art gallery and gift shop, doubles as a music venue and teaches fine and performing arts classes to children, teens and adults. Exhibit openings, paint alongs and yoga sessions all happen in the same rooms.

It is a block off the square, so it slots into a downtown morning without a second parking hunt. Towns this size usually do not sustain a staffed gallery, and the fact that Bonham does is a fair signal of what the downtown investment has been buying.

The City of Bonham created this lake in 1969 and still runs the recreation area on it. There is a public swimming beach, a fishing dock, a double wide boat ramp, a playground, an open pavilion, an enclosed event center with heat and air, and camping that takes rigs up to 45 feet on full hookups. Reach it by taking FM 273 northeast out of town and turning east on Recreation Road 3.

It is last on this list for a reason we would rather state than hide. Residents have organised a Restore Lake Bonham campaign over sedimentation, water clarity and erosion that they trace to a 2018 flood, and a reading in March 2026 put the surface about two and a half feet under full pool. Sources also disagree on the acreage, with the figure most often quoted around a thousand. Treat it as a camping, beach and boat ramp lake rather than a clear water one.