There's a woman in Marfa who remembers the last drive-in picture show in her county. Nobody's asked her about it yet.
That's the job. Get to her before the story's gone for good.
Every Bit Texas started in 2025 because Texas has 254 counties, 1,224 incorporated cities and towns, and better than 4,000 unincorporated communities beyond that — and most of them never get written about, not really, not the small stuff. The drive-in that closed. The general store that's a museum now. The German immigrant town nobody outside the county has heard of. We've covered camping spots, the truth behind Texas restaurant chains, the Sunday beer laws nobody understands, a rescue ranch, an observatory a guy built in his backyard because he wanted to look at the stars. All of it free to read. All of it staying that way.
We're not putting anything behind a paywall. We're asking you to help us get to more of it before it disappears.
Why now
Old-timers are the primary source, and when they're gone, the story goes with them — there's no research that replaces a person who was actually there. Right now, this month, somebody's photo box is fading in a closet and somebody's VHS tape of a family reunion is warping in a garage in Nacogdoches or Odessa or wherever. We're a two-person operation. What we can save this year is a direct function of what comes in this year.
Where the money goes
Gas, lodging, and time to physically show up — a county historian in a town that's never had a reporter show up, a cemetery walk with someone who knows every name on every stone, two hours in the truck because the story's worth two hours.
Free spotlights for Texan-owned small businesses, in articles and in the Sunday newsletter, no sponsored-post fine print attached. A diner in Comfort or a boot shop in Alpine gets the same shot as anybody bigger.
And equipment — photo scanners for the boxes people mail us, film converters for reels nobody's played in thirty years, VHS and Hi8 capture gear so a home movie doesn't die quietly in a closet, backup storage so once something's saved, it stays saved instead of sitting on one drive waiting to fail.
No offices. No overhead line you can't picture. A truck, a scanner, and time in the field.
You'd be one of the people keeping this going
Over 7,000 of you follow along on Facebook, another 3,000 on TikTok — transplants, seventh-generation Texans, people who just like a good story. If this site's ever cost you twenty minutes you meant to spend on something else, this is the part where you get to be more than a reader.
A tank of gas and a real afternoon with someone who's been waiting fifty years for somebody to ask.
$120 a year — about one used history book, except you get fifty-two weeks of them. Keeps roughly one story alive a month that would've otherwise ended up in a box in somebody's garage.
Still counts. A few hundred people at five dollars is a scanner, a tank of gas, a trip to Marfa.
Prefer to give monthly? Pick an amount above — every tier is a subscription.
If money's tight right now, genuinely, no guilt — share an article instead. That costs you nothing and it's one of the most useful things you can do for us. Follow along, share what hits you, and if a few dollars a month makes sense down the road, we'll still be here.
— Marcus, founder, Every Bit Texas
Galveston Island