TX Burger

This isn't my picture, unfortunately, it's theirs—source I've been sitting on this post for a long time, and one of the reasons was that I didn't have a picture of my own. However, there's nothing really special about it, something where I have to take a picture because it's going to change soon. (There is something I did for a future post; that will have to wait).

One of the things I did a while back was dedicate a lot of resources to the "open source" Wikimapia, and while I've described the reasons why I don't deal with it anymore has been described here (March 31, 2022) and I have to admit that much of this post is going to be adapted from what I wrote on Wikimapia, which I worked a lot on before I moved focus back to this blog. The building at 14895 FM 2154 has seen several incarnations come and go before its current incarnation as TX Burger, which re-did the facade and paved the parking lot.

Starting chronologically, the first tenant here when the building was constructed in 2004 was Junek's Barbecue, which moved out from the gas station just north of it. Junek's folded sometime around 2011 or early 2012.

After Junek's folded, for several years, the building was tenanted by a series of restaurants, none of which lasted a year. The second restaurant here was Outlaw Jack's Brew N Chew which featured hamburgers, barbecue, and fried seafood. It opened early 2013, closed, reopened a few months later, and then closed again. The third, Country Cafe, opened up in 2014, but was gone by January 2015. There was "Chubby's Meat Wagon" (late April or early May 2015 but closed September...as it lasted three months I know almost nothing about it) as the fourth restaurant.

The fifth restaurant here was Cajuns Bayou Grille. It opened February 2016, giving the exterior new paint and enlarging the parking area, but closed just five months later, partially because of new City of College Station ordinances that prohibited the expansion of the restaurant without additional improvements. This is the only restaurant in the spot that I actually ate at, getting some crawfish and having enough for some leftovers (though properly re-heating crawfish is something I have yet to master).

Finally, the sixth restaurant opened in July 2017, a branch of Madisonville-based TX Burger (formerly Texas Burger until around 2010 or 2011 when the chain rebranded, possibly to avoid confusion with a Midland-Odessa chain of the same name). TX Burger did a significant re-do of the front facade and paved the parking lot for the first time, and as a result it has been here since.

Editor's Note: Want to go beyond the limits of Bryan-College Station? Visit my new blog, Numbered Exits, featuring Waco, Dallas, and even out of state spots.

America's Country Store

Picture taken March 2019
I love lineages of companies, and you may have noticed the Purina checkerboard logo on the outside of this store, just like many of the Purina-branded pet food inside. The thing is, those are two different companies, and they have been for decades. The "America's Country Store" is a franchise of Purina Mills, which operate animal feed mills in rural areas, but it spun off from the original Ralston Purina in the mid-1980s. Purina Mills has been owned by Land O'Lakes Inc. since 2001, while the original Ralston Purina (having divested all of its "human food" operations over the years) was purchased by Nestlé around the same time and merged with their Friskies PetCare Company division (becoming known as "Nestlé Purina PetCare" since). One place in town with Ralston Purina heritage is, surprisingly, Jack in the Box, which Ralston Purina owned in the 1970s and 1980s, and we recently had a post regarding the one in College Station.

America's Country Store started in 1997 but the College Station (Wellborn) store opened in October 2005 by franchisee Close Quarters Feed and Pet Supply. It was always designated toward animals, but in recent years (very recent, apparently, as of this writing) converted its garden center into a pet boarding service. This is just out of view in the picture, but can be seen in Street View (as a garden center at least as of this writing).

14675 Wellborn Road

Junek's Grocery / Wellborn Grocery

My photo. I wish I had taken it when was still, you know, a real sign.

Gas station nostalgia isn't an obscure hobby, but there seems to be less for the recent nostalgia as well. Case in point: the old "gray and solid colors" Chevron stations from the 1980s and 1990s. I first really noticed the difference a few years ago (there was an abandoned Chevron in Conroe, Texas, in 2011 that had the striking difference, and a Chevron near Jersey Village survived with the original color scheme before the tower finally came down this year).

This "gas nostalgia" often goes hand in hand with the growing endangerment of rural gas stations that are often small and out of date but have excellent barbecue, and the former Chevron in Wellborn was an example of this (along with Rolling Ridge Grocery). Junek's Grocery (Junek being pronounced unfortunately similarly to "eunuch") was the name but around 2007, the Chevron here lots its pumps and branding around 2007, about the same time when the new design was starting to roll out chain-wide (probably closer to 2010 was when it saturated) and not when a more modern Chevron was built nearby.

Because of how far away Wellborn was, I never had the barbecue here. About the time the gas station stopped selling gas, Junek's Barbecue moved out to a nearby lot, had a change of ownership, and closed (becoming a revolving door of restaurants and eateries, none of which have survived for more than a few years: Outlaw Jack's Brew N Chew, Country Cafe, Chubby's Meat Wagon, and now a Cajun restaurant. Meanwhile, the former Chevron station renovated (the facade, at least) and became Wellborn Grocery. You can also see what the facade looked like as "Junek's Grocery" right here or what it looks like as "Wellborn Grocery" right here.

The Chevron here was always a fun sight to see, as I never went this way except on rare occasions (such as going on a long trip). Even in the early to mid 2000s, there wasn't much to see past the Exxon at Rock Prairie. The area between Graham Road and Rock Prairie only had a few (brand new) buildings, Highway 40 didn't exist yet, and Wellborn was entirely two-way only, save for a left hand turn lane near Rock Prairie Road and the remains of North Graham Road. Then, after you'd give up on whether you'd see anything until Navasota, you came to Wellborn.

14889 FM 2154

UPDATE 10-16-2023:: This had been partially updated and rewritten in 2015, but I wanted to mention that Google Street View shows the Chevron disappearing between 2008 and 2009, not 2007 as the above article states. A very old (1983) shot of the store can be seen here, as a result I've added [Phillips 66] to the post and changed it to [1980s].