BACK IN 1997, THE MEMBERS of the CanadianHemphill County Economic Development Council (EDC) took a look at the numbers and cringed. The Panhandle town of Canadian had not known prosperity since the oil-and-gas boom of 19751985. There were no jobs, and like most small towns in the area, Canadian was shrinking. There had been about 4,500 people living there in 1985, but the EDC estimated that half of them had left. “So I started searching frantically for something that would attract more people to Canadian,” recalls Remelle Farrar, who was then an insurance agent and EDC volunteer, “and as I looked around to see what had worked in the past and in other places, I kept running across this term, ‘ecotourism.'” So Farrar proposed a…
The post O, Canadian! appeared first on Texas Monthly.