FM 878 is a lonely road, but it’s not a long one. It meanders for a mere 11 miles through the open prairie between Waxahachie and Palmer. There are plenty of crop fields and pastures to look at. A few low creeks trickle past. The road gets hardly any traffic—and that’s why Marvin Borders was so flummoxed.
Borders, a gentleman farmer and lifelong Waxahachie resident, was driving through a particularly empty stretch of FM 878 more than four decades ago when he noticed some people installing gas pumps in front of a small, abandoned farmhouse. A couple of motel cabins were going up on either side of the house. The unassuming complex sat at the edge of a plowed field of dirt sweeping off to the north as far as the eye could see. Situated 30 miles south of Dallas but a world away from the hustle and bustle of the Metroplex, it was hard to imagine a more ill-advised spot for that sort of business venture. The farmer needed to warn these strangers before it was too late.
“My grandpa was kind of a Nosy Nelly, and he would talk to anybody,” recalls Borders’ granddaughter, Amy Borders, a Waxahachie native who was a little girl at the time. “He pulled up and told them that was not a good place to build a gas station.”
“Oh,” a member of the crew replied. “We’re building a movie set.”
The emptiness, in this instance, was perfect. Hollywood had discovered the Texas prairie, where the flatness and vastness, paired with epic skies, was stark enough to imbue any film with a sense of isolation. The little farmhouse next to
