The Best Things to Do in Tyler, Texas

Fourteen acres holding roughly 38,000 bushes across about 600 varieties, laid out in 1952 as a living catalogue for the rose nurseries that made this the Rose Capital of America. It went on the National Register of Historic Places on 22 March 2019, and the Tyler Morning Telegraph reported in September 2025 that it draws more than 100,000 visitors a year.

The Rose Garden Center at the entrance holds the Tyler Rose Museum, which keeps the Texas Rose Festival gowns and coronation regalia. The garden itself costs nothing and never closes its gates.

D.K. and Lottie Caldwell grew this out of a 1930s child development laboratory and opened it to the public in the early 1950s with fewer than a hundred animals and six staff. It now runs to 85 acres and more than 2,000 animals, laid out as East Africa, South America and North America.

It is accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, which also means members of other AZA zoos get a reciprocal discount at the gate. Cheetahs, black rhinoceros, African penguins and ring tailed lemurs are among the endangered species on site.

985 acres of Piney Woods on land deeded to the state in 1934 and 1935. CCC Company 2888 built the cabins, the shelters and the lake between 1935 and 1939, and the park opened in 1939. The 64 acre lake is the centerpiece, with a swimming beach and bathhouse open roughly Memorial Day through Labor Day, a park store renting canoes, kayaks, paddleboards and johnboats, and no gasoline motors allowed on the water.

This is the closest real hiking to Tyler, with more than 13 miles of trail across a short nature loop, a hiking trail and a long mountain bike route.

Open since 1993 in an old car dealership building four blocks north of the square, with three exhibit halls and a courtyard. Texas Highways singled out the KO Mine, a recreated fossil and gem sluice where water runs off a tower into sand for children to dig through.

It is the one attraction in Tyler built specifically for children under about twelve, and it is indoors, which matters in July and in a Texas thunderstorm.

Established in August 1863 and not closed until 19 May 1865, Camp Ford held more than 5,300 prisoners at its peak in July 1864. The stockade site is now a county park managed by the Smith County Historical Society, with an interpretive kiosk, a signed walking trail, a picnic area and a reconstruction of the cabin built by Lt. Col. J.B. Leake.

The American Battlefield Trust lists it as a heritage site. It takes half an hour, costs nothing, and is the most historically significant ground in Smith County.

Built in 1859 and called Bonnie Castle by its first owner, bought by Dr. Samuel Adams Goodman in 1866 and by his son Dr. William Jeffries Goodman the year after. The Italianate second story went on around 1880 and the two story columns and circular porticos came with a 1926 remodel. Sallie Goodman LeGrand, the last heir to live here, willed the house, the land and the contents to the City of Tyler on her death in 1939 on the condition it stay open as a public museum.

That condition is why this is not a period room set. The furniture is the family's own, and some of it predates the house. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark since 1962, National Register since 1976.

Founded on 25 January 1985 by Bob Layton and housed in the airport's old passenger terminal. The ramp holds Korea and Vietnam era military aircraft including an F-105D Thunderchief, an F-4D Phantom II, an F-100 Super Sabre, a T-33 Shooting Star and an AD-5 Skyraider, and the collection's C-47 carries the name Southern Cross.

Inside there is a library, a theater room, a flight simulator and an archive running to tens of thousands of items. It is volunteer run, which is why the week is short.

Opened in 1971 in a building by architect E. Davis Wilcox on a wooded corner of the Tyler Junior College campus. The permanent collection runs past 1,200 works and leans Texan, with James Surls, Vernon Fisher and Terry Allen alongside Alexander Calder and Charles Umlauf.

Traveling exhibitions rotate through the front galleries, so what is on the walls in March is not what is on them in September. Admission is a few dollars, and free for students, children under twelve, and TJC and City of Tyler employees.

The Smith County Historical Society keeps its museum and archives in Tyler's 1904 Carnegie Library building. The front rooms hold the permanent and rotating exhibits, the building carries Work Projects Administration wall murals, and the collections include the memorabilia of a pioneer Chinese family in Smith County.

This is the same society that manages Camp Ford, so the two make a sensible pair on the same morning.

Built in 1905 by the St. Louis Southwestern Railway, whose shops made Tyler a railroad town. Passenger service ended in April 1956, the building passed through other uses, and it was donated to the City of Tyler in 1988. The Cotton Belt Rail Historical Society's Tyler Tap Chapter runs it now, and KLTV filmed there in January 2026.

The bulk of the hands on exhibit is the Clyde Bragg model train collection. Admission is free and donations are asked for rather than required.