The Best Things to Do in Mount Pleasant, TX

Scott Glover, who founded Mid America Pet Food, started buying airplanes in 1996 and turned the collection into a museum in 2013. The fleet runs from Golden Age civilian designs through World War II warbirds to Vietnam era aircraft, and the governing idea is that they fly. These are maintained, airworthy machines rather than static displays, which is why the hangar smells like oil and why volunteers are usually in the middle of something when you arrive.

Admission is free and there is no gift shop upsell. Volunteers walk visitors through the hangars and answer questions. In its first year the museum flew more than 600 veterans and their families at no charge, and veteran flights remain part of what it does. Sources count the fleet differently, from about forty aircraft in an aviation trade write up to more than sixty in the regional tourism listing, so treat any number you read as approximate and go look for yourself.

Mount Pleasant has been a Texas Main Street city since 1993 and a nationally recognized Main Street program since 2010, and the downtown shows it. Brick paved streets, antique stores, gift shops and tearooms sit around a courthouse square that also carries the Titus County Veterans Memorial, the Bell Tower and a Confederate monument.

The single best thing to look at is the large Drink Dr Pepper advertisement painted on the side of Jo's Antiques, a red brick building dating to 1894. Local artist David Freeman restored it, and the Texas Historical Commission's heritage travel program lists it as the downtown landmark worth stopping for. The courthouse itself has been rebuilt into several different buildings. It went up in brick in the mid 1890s under an Italianate design with a clock tower, lost the tower in a 1940 remodel that stuccoed it into Art Deco, was altered again in the 1960s, and was returned to its 1940s look in the 1990s.

This is a Pittsburg mailing address rather than a Mount Pleasant one, and it is still the outdoor answer for anybody staying in town. The park covers 640 acres on the north shore of the lake, with 75 campsites on water and electricity, primitive sites, limited use cabins and screened shelters, plus 3.3 miles of wooded trail that hikers and mountain bikers share.

Day visitors get a swimming area, a boat ramp, a lighted fishing pier and picnic sites without booking anything. The lake sits next door to Lake Cypress Springs and to the old Monticello lignite country, and the whole cluster is why Titus and Camp counties draw weekend traffic off Interstate 30 at all.

Sweet Shop USA started in Fort Worth in 1953 and moved the whole operation to Mount Pleasant in 2008. The plant is 80,000 square feet, it makes more than 250 varieties of handmade truffles, Brags, nuts and chews and Fudge Love, and it ships to thousands of retailers nationwide. That makes a town of about 16,000 people the home of one of the largest handmade chocolate manufacturers in the country.

The retail store is the part most visitors come for, with a remodeled coffee bar and samples before you buy. Factory tours exist and are guided, but they are not walk in. They run Tuesday and Wednesday and have to be booked at least a day ahead on the tour line, (903) 575-0033, which is a different number from the store.

The museum opened in January 2013 inside the public library, and it is better than the arrangement makes it sound. The centerpiece is a built out Caddo grass hut you walk into, with audio vignettes of village life, surrounded by a collection of Native American artifacts found in Titus County itself rather than bought in. A Civil War camp and a log cabin fill out the rest.

It is free, it takes half an hour, and it is the only place in the county that handles the pre settlement history at all. Group tours can be booked in advance, which is worth doing if you want somebody talking rather than reading placards.

This is the strangest good thing in Mount Pleasant. Members of the Texas Antique Phonograph Society pooled their private collections into a museum inside Hoover's Jewelry, which occupies the historic former Mount Pleasant library building. The machines fill the ground floor and two basement rooms, and the collection includes early phonographs plus rare recordings carrying the voices of Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Edison and William Jennings Bryan.

It is a working collection rather than a roped off one, and the value of a visit is hearing a cylinder played on the machine it was cut for. Curators David Hoover and Dustin Ellis are the people to ask for, and small guided tours can be arranged through the society by email.

The Jim and Elizabeth Whatley Center sits on the Northeast Texas Community College campus and is the performing arts hall for this corner of the state. The auditorium seats 599, counting 557 regular seats and six wheelchair spaces, with temporary seating available. Each season mixes national touring acts with college theatre productions, local talent and gallery exhibits, and the 2025 to 2026 Heart of the Arts season ran alongside the college's fortieth anniversary.

For anybody within an hour of Mount Pleasant it is the difference between driving to Tyler or Dallas for a show and not driving. Season tickets and single tickets both go through the box office.

The 2026 fair is billed as the 51st annual, which puts its start in the mid 1970s. The livestock show happens in the pavilion behind the civic center and is the serious part, since this is a poultry and cattle county where Pilgrim's Pride is the largest employer. Around it run a carnival, commercial exhibits, youth academic contests, food and music.

If you are choosing one week to see Mount Pleasant as itself rather than as a highway exit, this is the week. Everything else on this list is open the rest of the year.

Priefert is headquartered in Mount Pleasant and makes rodeo and ranch equipment, so the arena that carries the name is not sponsorship dressing. The Mount Pleasant Rodeo Association grounds carry six bucking chutes, a timed event area, horse stalls, a warm up area, a covered pavilion with a climate controlled kitchen, elevated box seating and bleachers for roughly 2,200.

The calendar is a mix of jackpots, youth rodeos, clinics and sanctioned rodeo, plus barrel racing and roping through the year. Related events happen at Priefert Ranch itself, including a spring roping week and a trail run, which is a separate property from the association grounds.

Dellwood is the city's main park and it has real history under it. The springs here were the site of the Dellwood Hotel, built by the Red Mineral Springs Development Company and running from 1909 to 1916, and the City of Mount Pleasant bought the 45 acres in 1951. A state historical marker on the grounds tells the story.

Today it holds a swimming pool, playgrounds, lighted tennis and basketball courts, baseball fields, a sand volleyball court, lighted pavilions, an outdoor stage, a reflecting pond and deck, and two lighted walking trails of roughly a third of a mile each. The city has a park improvement program underway that adds pickleball, a dog park and a new pavilion, so expect some of it to be fenced off.