The Best Things to Do in Corsicana, Texas

August Wiederman, a baker from Wiesbaden, started this in 1896 with the local entrepreneur Tom McElwee. The story that made it is genuinely odd. McElwee put up travelling ballplayers and circus performers above the bakery, and those people carried the fruitcake back out across the country and eventually the world. It has been the thing Corsicana is known for ever since.

The downtown store is the original. It is a small shop attached to the working bakery and factory, and it sells far more than fruitcake, including the pecan cakes and a full cafe menu. There is a second, larger location out on the interstate at 2035 S I-45 that keeps longer hours and has Tesla Superchargers, but the downtown one is the one worth the detour.

Three collections sit inside the Cook Education Center, and the Civil War gallery is the reason to come. It interprets the war through first person accounts from both sides, drawn from a holding of more than 16,000 letters and diaries. That is an unusual depth of primary material for a community college museum in a town of 25,000, and the galleries are built to let you actually read it.

The Western Art Gallery runs revolving displays of original work on the American West, and a third gallery covers prehistoric Central Texas. Admission is $8 for adults, $6 for seniors and $4 for students. Budget an hour and a half if you read, forty minutes if you do not.

Since 1958 this has been where Navarro County's surviving historic structures get moved rather than demolished. The frontier section holds eight log buildings, including a home, a general store and a blacksmith shop, and you walk through rather than peering in. It is small, it is well kept, and it does the job that a much larger museum would do worse.

Three collections share the site. The Lefty Frizzell Museum honours the Corsicana born singer who reshaped country phrasing in the 1950s, the Wolf Brand Chili truck is here because Wolf Brand started in Corsicana, and the Les Cotten Memorial Peace Officer's Museum reopened in recent years. Admission runs about $5 for adults and $3 for students, military and children.

Corsicana got rich on oil in the late 1890s and built a downtown to match, and unlike most Texas towns of its size it kept the buildings. Beaton Street and the blocks around 6th Avenue hold the result, a dense run of brick commercial fronts now filled with antique dealers, coffee, restaurants and galleries. The city runs an active Main Street program and a self guided bronze audio tour of the downtown sculptures.

Four other entries on this list are inside these few blocks, which is the argument for parking once. The three story Christmas tree that goes up on Beaton Street just before Thanksgiving is the town's single busiest photograph of the year.

It opened in 1921 as a vaudeville theatre, turned into a movie house in the 1930s, and came within sight of demolition in the mid 1990s before a community effort bought and restored it. It reopened in February 2002 with a production of Porgy and Bess and has run as a nonprofit performing arts venue ever since. It seats 550.

The programme leans on tribute acts, musicals, concerts and film, and the building doubles as a rental venue. For a town this size, having a restored 550 seat room with a real season is the difference between a downtown that empties at six and one that does not.

Russell Stover runs a manufacturing plant here and a retail outlet attached to it, on a street the company got named Pecan Delight Avenue. The draw is simple. Seconds, overruns and limited editions sell at outlet prices, and the selection is far wider than a supermarket aisle.

Do not come expecting a Willy Wonka tour. This is a factory store, not a guided plant visit, and that is worth knowing before you build an afternoon around it. As a twenty minute stop off the interstate with a bag of Pecan Delights at the end, it earns its place.

Around 41,000 surface acres at conservation pool and roughly 330 miles of shoreline, which makes it the third largest inland reservoir in Texas by area. It is ten miles southeast of downtown Corsicana and it is the reason a lot of people come to Navarro County at all.

Texas Parks and Wildlife rates it strongest for catfish, crappie, white bass and hybrid stripers. Largemouth fishing can be very good where you find vegetation and clear water, but those areas are limited relative to the size of the lake. Maximum depth runs about 75 feet.

In 1894 a crew drilling for municipal water in Corsicana hit oil instead. What followed made this the first commercially significant oilfield in Texas and set off everything that came after it, Spindletop included. The park was dedicated in 1990 on about half an acre and carries an oil derrick from the discovery site.

It takes ten minutes. It is free. It is also the single most historically consequential thing in Navarro County, and almost nobody outside Texas knows the story, which is exactly why it is on this list rather than left off for being small.

It started in 1971 in Navarro College's Arena Theatre and has been producing continuously for more than fifty years. It is a genuine community theatre, working with veteran local performers and actively recruiting new ones, and it runs a youth programme alongside the main stage.

The attached gallery shows local and regional artists and is free to walk into during box office hours, which makes it a reasonable ten minute stop on a downtown afternoon even when nothing is on stage.

A 30,000 square foot brick building downtown that runs show nights, dinner shows, dances and a vendors market through the year. The bookings range from local country acts to touring songwriters, and the city calendar carries the schedule alongside everything else going on in Corsicana.

This is a calendar dependent listing in the plainest sense. On a night with nothing booked there is no reason to drive over. On a dance night it is the liveliest room in Navarro County.