Clayton Maxwell

Oct 22, 2024 | texashighways.com | Clayton Maxwell |Tyson Bird

Texas’ friendliest places and faces It’s volunteer gardening day at Community First! Village in East Austin, and Shaeneeka and I are kneeling in flower beds by the chicken coop, planting tomatoes. She makes a hole with her spade, and I plop in a tomato plant. We find a snail and feed it to chickens on the other side of the fence, telling them it’s escargot. Shaeneeka’s good conversation distracts me from the stench of bird poop.

Oct 10, 2024 | texasmonthly.com | Clayton Maxwell

In our series Stuff Texans Love, our state’s most stylish celebrities share their shopping lists. From his early childhood helping out his high school football coach dad on the sidelines to his 14-year career in the NFL, former University of Texas star quarterback Colt McCoy has learned much from the game he loves: You train hard, put your heart into it, and when you get hit, you keep going and don’t complain.

Sep 27, 2024 | texasmonthly.com | Clayton Maxwell

Step inside the co-op at University of Texas at Austin these days, and you can feel the buzz of a winning season. The jerseys of quarterbacks Quinn Ewers and Arch Manning hang from wall racks, too in demand to dangle there for long. The members of the bald mannequin family by the front door show off their excitement about joining the Southeastern Conference. They sport SEC T-shirts and other burnt orange gear—even their plastic dog wears a Longhorns-branded harness.

Aug 26, 2024 | texasmonthly.com | Clayton Maxwell |Rose Cahalan

Sheep Meadow is quiet on this Wednesday morning in June. The guitar-strummers and sunbathers who lounged on its lawn yesterday are gone, and now its only occupants are the elms and sycamores that cluster along its edge, where I now stand with the Central Park Conservancy’s historian of the past forty years, Sara Cedar Miller. I have come to the leafy center of Manhattan on a quest to find traces, however faint, of parkmaker Frederick Law Olmsted’s 1854 horseback ride across Texas.

Jun 11, 2024 | texasmonthly.com | Clayton Maxwell

Spirits are high in the class I’m crashing on an April night at a community center in Castroville, a small town 25 miles west of San Antonio. About fifty of us, including the mayor, sit in folding chairs while the language teacher, a man from Alsace, a region in northeast France that passed back and forth between that country and Germany over the centuries, leads us in a song praising a schnitzelbank.