A.J. Head Service Station
Garland, Dallas County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The Federal Aid Road Act (1916) and the formation of the Texas Highway Department resulted in the creation of Texas Highway 1, or Bankhead Highway. The Bankhead was America's second east-to-west transcontinental highway, which went through several Texas cities, including Garland. Commercial growth and a boom of businesses along the highway boosted Garland's economy for decades. A.J. Head, the original owner of the A.J. Head/Humble Station, opened a filling station in 1947. It housed many businesses to serve Bankhead Highway drivers, including a tire shop, auto repair shop, bail bond office, welding shop and discount retail store. Head sold the business in 1957, coinciding with the decreased importance of the Bankhead Highway. Still at its original location, the station has received few significant changes over the years. Designed by Robert Otis Lagrone, the two-story brick building was built in the Streamline Moderne style, popular in the 1930s and 1940s. The style emphasized smooth surfaces, horizontal lines, and curved corners. The curved brick wall of the building and the original metal canopy illustrated important characteristics of the style. While the canopy at the front of the building was removed, the steel and horizontal lines emphasized the style's industirual aesthetic. Because of its important place on the Bankhead Highway, the A.J. Head Humble Station shows its important role in Garland's essential economic and industrial growth in the 1940s and 1950s. (2018)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The Bankhead Highway—America's second transcontinental east-west route, born of the 1916 Federal Aid Road Act—ran through Garland and fueled a boom of roadside businesses. A.J. Head opened this filling station in 1947, and over the years it housed a tire shop, auto repair, welding, a bail bond office, and a discount store to serve highway travelers. Designed by Robert Otis Lagrone in the Streamline Moderne style, its curved brick wall and metal canopy captured the sleek, horizontal look popular in the 1930s and 1940s.
Why it matters
The station embodies the mid-century automobile age and the highway commerce that drove the growth of towns like Garland before the interstate era.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The middle of the twentieth century belonged to the automobile, and few places show it as plainly as a roadside filling station on an old highway. When A.J. Head opened his station in Garland in 1947, America was pouring out of the war years and onto the road. Cars were multiplying, families were traveling for pleasure as much as necessity, and the businesses that served drivers were booming.
The stage for all of this had been set decades earlier. The Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 and the creation of the Texas Highway Department launched the era of planned, paved, long-distance highways. Out of that effort came Texas Highway 1, the Bankhead Highway, one of the first great transcontinental routes running east to west across the country and straight through towns like Garland.
A highway like the Bankhead was an economic artery. The commercial growth and boom of businesses strung along it lifted local economies for decades. Garland's growth in the 1940s and 1950s is inseparable from the stream of traffic that the highway carried past its doorstep.
People & events
The human story here begins with A.J. Head, who opened his filling station in 1947 and gave the building its name. In the classic pattern of a busy highway stop, the station was never just a place to buy gasoline. Over the years it sheltered a whole cluster of small enterprises under one roof, including a tire shop, an auto repair shop, a welding shop, a bail bond office, and a discount retail store, each one aimed at the travelers rolling along the Bankhead.
Head sold the business in 1957, and the timing was no accident. That sale coincided with the fading importance of the Bankhead Highway itself, as newer and faster roads began to pull traffic away. The rise and decline of one man's station tracked the rise and decline of the road it served.
The building owes its distinctive look to Robert Otis Lagrone, who designed it in the Streamline Moderne style that was fashionable in the 1930s and 1940s. That style loved smooth surfaces, long horizontal lines, and rounded corners, and the station's curved brick wall and its original metal canopy were textbook expressions of it. Though the front canopy was later removed, the steel and the strong horizontal lines still carry the industrial, forward-looking spirit the style was after.
Its place in the American story
This modest station on a Garland corner is a witness to one of the defining transformations in American life: the way the automobile and the highway remade the country in the twentieth century. The Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 helped set the nation on the path from muddy local roads to a web of long-distance highways, and the Bankhead, as America's second east-to-west transcontinental route, was part of the backbone of that new mobility.
Along thousands of miles of such roads grew a whole new commercial culture, the world of filling stations, garages, motels, and roadside shops that served people in motion. A.J. Head's station, with its tire shop and repair bays and retail counter, is a compact example of that culture, a single building doing the many jobs the highway economy demanded.
Its decline after 1957 also marks a national turning point. As the great limited-access interstates rose, the older highways and the towns that lined them lost their central place, and countless roadside businesses faded. The station's Streamline Moderne design links it to the wider American love affair with speed and the machine age, a look that promised motion even when the building stood still.
If you visit
Look for the lines of the building, because that is where its story lives. This is a two-story brick station built in the Streamline Moderne style, so let your eye follow the curved brick wall and the long horizontal emphasis that the designer used to make a stationary building look like it was moving. The front canopy is gone now, but the steel and the sleek proportions still tell you what era this came from.
Remember that the station has stayed at its original location and has seen few significant changes over the years, which makes it a genuine survivor from the highway's heyday. Standing in front of it, picture the Bankhead traffic that once streamed past, drivers pulling in for gas, a tire, a repair, or a quick stop at the discount store.
For anyone tracing the old Bankhead route through the Dallas area, this is a rewarding stop, a real piece of the roadside world that the interstates eventually replaced. Take a minute to appreciate how much of mid-century American life happened at corners exactly like this one, where the open road met the everyday business of a growing town.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · A.J. Head
- · Robert Otis Lagrone
Themes & tags
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