Each of our 2025 travel stories will focus on a Texas festival. To welcome in the spring season, we headed to Palestine for the annual Dogwood Festival.

On this gray, cool mid-morning Friday in March, Palestine's Davey Dogwood Park is living up to its flowery name. Delicately blooming dogwood trees shine under the canopy of the park's 254 acres of hardwoods and pines.

The Pineywoods region forms the U.S. western demarcation line for dogwoods to thrive. Palestine and Anderson County mark the tree's annual three-week blooming window with the Texas Dogwood Trails Celebration, a series of events running the last two weekends of March through the first one of April (no guarantees that Mother Nature will abide by the blooming schedule).

The gnarly, stumpy trees grow across the southeastern states, ranging from Florida to Maine and extending westward into Illinois and East Texas. From the highway, the tree's four-petal white blooms with red-stain dots can resemble fluttering butterflies floating in the trees.

The dogwood plays significant roles in both Christian and Native American lore. Its red fall fruit provides sustenance for mammals, from squirrels to deer, as well as almost 30 bird species.

Palestine first officially embraced its dogwoods in 1938 with the inaugural Dogwood Trails gathering, a slog through uneven trails that reportedly attracted 20,000 people. They are versatile trees but can fall victim to disease — in 2012, volunteers planted 200 dogwood seedlings in the park to replace trees lost to drought and fungi.

The state Legislature designated Palestine as the official Dogwood Trails Capital of Texas in May 2023. Today, about 5,000 guests mingle with the town's 19,000 residents for the celebration's first weekend.

From the park's pavilion, my wife and I stroll well-groomed trails. The canopy above is alive with the melodic chatter of Carolina wrens, white-throated sparrows, northern cardinals, white-breasted nuthatches, tufted titmice, ruby-crowned kinglets and yellow-throated vireos. A perfect fallen bloom, swollen from overnight precipitation, rests in the middle of the trail before us.

Flowering Gardens Fit for a Fairy

We enjoy some of the eight miles of gently rolling trails before turning onto the 1.6-mile Fairy Garden Trail. We quickly encounter many miniature scenes created as part of the festival's annual Fairy Garden Trail competition, an award-winning event the local tourism office started in 2019 to encourage families to get out of their cars during drives to view dogwood blooms.

Fanciful is the day's theme. The Rawls family from Tyler painstakingly works on their fairy camp the day before official judging. Overnight rains have left parts of other entries in need of repair. About six other groups are in various stages of construction.

The family visited the competition grounds the previous year, enjoyed the fairy creations and decided to enter this time around. Daughter Reagan is “very fairy oriented,” her mom, Lisa, says. Reagan creates a soccer field from moss as she talks. Entries are supposed to consist of 90 percent organic materials.

The Rawls' creation includes cabins running up the trunk of a tree. They styled the cabins after those seen in the movie The Parent Trap - one of the family's favorite films. Camp Becorn derives its name from its handmade dwellers, an idea borrowed from Rhode Island photographer-designer-illustrator David Bird's creations fashioned with acorns

The next day, judges award the Rawls family second place out of more than 80 entries.

History Rides the Rails

We leave the park and head toward downtown, where empty vendor stalls line the streets in anticipation of Saturday's festivities. As we walk about, we note train engine stickers on store windows, indicating membership in the local chamber of commerce.

The railroad industry was crucial to Palestine's development. The city raised bonds totaling $150,000 in 1872 (today's equivalent: about $5 million) for the Houston and Great Northern Railroad Company, securing its pledge to build a depot and “forever thereafter keep and maintain” its headquarters, machine shops and roundhouses here. Subsequent iterations of the company dropped employment ranks from about 1,000 at the high point to about 100 at the remaining freight repair shop of the modern-day successor, Union Pacific Railroad.

Many Palestine residents, or kin, have railroad roots. Business owner Robert Lane worked for the railroad for 38 years before retiring about 15 years ago. Today you will find him where he spent a good measure of his youth, behind a neon-lit sign for City Shoe Shop.

Lane will close his shop Saturday, but today he puts a new sole on a pair of well-worn western boots at a weathered work bench his father toiled at for most of his life. He demonstrates stitching on a large Singer machine that dates to 1940s. His father, Ernest, founded the business in 1943 and “repaired boots, saddles, dog collars and all kinds of stuff to make a living,” he says, but Lane works strictly on footwear.

Starting when he was 8 years old, Lane learned leather work from his father. The shop's layout has remained about the same since 1957, so his surroundings fit him, well, like a comfortable old shoe.

Festival Pies, Oh My!

Just west of the 1914 Anderson County courthouse, a group of revitalized historic structures comprise Old Town Palestine. One of them, Oxbow Bakery, a mother-son operation, has served East Texas fans for more than a decade.

At 2 p.m. Friday, only 15 scattered single-slice pieces of the day's pies remain for sale, but their festival pies are a tradition, and founder Becky Wolfe is in the kitchen, preparing 120 pies for Saturday as her son David talks with customers. There is no pre-ordering for the in-demand pies, David explains, but if you call Saturday morning before Oxbow opens at 10 the crew will likely hold one for you (whole pies don't last long after the opening bell).

My high-standards, pastry chef traveling partner nabs one of today's remaining slices, French coconut, and devours it on the front patio. She is impressed enough to request a repeat visit Saturday for another taste.

Let the Celebration Begin

On Festival Saturday, we venture downtown early, watching vendors prepare their stands. A small train
offers $2 rides through the streets, past an adopt-a-dog pavilion full of yapping adoptees.

The aroma of freshly popped corn already floats about. A work crew, oblivious to the straggles of people and leashed dogs of all ilk strolling into town from surrounding neighborhoods, paints a corner building. The city is aggressively courting new business and renovating downtown buildings. The town has more than 1,800 historic sites (25 of which are on the National Register of Historic Places). While waiting for the festival parade to begin, we enter one such site, Sacred Heart Catholic Church, where a guide escorts us through the church.

The church's construction process (1890-93) was immense: Our guide explains that mud from the Trinity River was transported via wagon to town, where workers molded about 675,000 bricks by hand and baked them on site. Sacred Heart Catholic was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, and is one of the state's five remaining Victorian Gothic Style churches.

We leave the church just as the parade passes. People wave, laugh and call out to each other.

The line of cars seems endless, following a winding trek through town. Vendor booths offer everything from quality knives, fine art and novelty goods to local food goodies. We poke around the Master Gardener Tree and Plant Sale. Various live music acts offer a celebratory soundtrack throughout the day.

After a full day, we grab a bite and secure another solitary piece of pie before heading to the Old Time Music and Dulcimer Festival, celebrating its 22nd year of dogwood festival association.

The music festival and instructional workshops run three days, where participants can learn and jam on various generational instruments such as autoharps, fiddles and mountain dulcimers. Two evening music sessions are open to the public for $5.

At 4 p.m., the Baptist church hosting the event fills up with guests and workshop participants — young and young at heart — lugging their instrument cases. The general murmur of conversation wanes as a series of performers play — including a demonstration of a “stick fiddle,” a piece of wood with bottle caps nailed into it. World-renowned guitarist, singer and songwriter Joe Newberry does a set on his clawhammer banjo, with some storytelling mixed in.

We end the day on a high note, knowing that this dogwood celebration continues for another two weekends. The first weekend proved blooming fun.

Attend this Year's Festival

March 22, 2025 (with additional celebrations over the following two weekends)
palestinechamber.org/dogwood-festival/

Experience Palestine

All aboard!

The Texas State Railroad Dogwood Lunch Train's four-hour journey passes through dogwood blooms and pine forest on all three celebration Saturdays. The Railroad Heritage Center offers history and a scale model railroad.

Eat from a Wide Range of Choices

Order birria tacos at the drive-through Taqueria Mi Rancho. Enjoy the American menu at the Queen Street Grille in the Redlands Hotel while watching the sun illuminate the stained-glass windows of Sacred Heart Catholic Church across the street. Join locals for breakfast at the folksy Bird's Egg Café.

Inside or outside?

Beginning the celebration's second weekend, catch a Palestine Community Theater play at the Texas Theater. The 25,560-acre Lake Palestine, 35 miles north of town, offers fishing for white and hybrid striped bass, trophy catfish and crappie.

Stay a While

Find your style of stay at conventional hotels, converted downtown apartments for short-term use, or at the remodeled historic Redlands Hotel, which dates to 1914.

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