The Town

Clifton sits on the Bosque River in the middle of Bosque County, two hours south of Dallas and an hour and a half north of Austin. Norwegian settlers arrived here in the 1850s, and the county still calls itself the Norwegian Capital of Texas — there are stone churches within twenty miles built by those families.

The town has a hardware store, coffee shops, a bakery, antique dealers, a working cotton gin and more studio artists per capita than most towns its size in the state. That last part is not an accident; the center has been teaching here for eighty years.

Downtown is a few blocks of nineteenth-century limestone storefronts, most of them occupied. The Bosque Museum, two blocks from the center, holds the Horn Shelter archaeological collection — one of the oldest human burials found in North America.

Make a weekend of it. Come Friday for a show at the tin building, spend Saturday in the galleries and the antique shops, and drive the river road out to the Norwegian churches on Sunday morning.