The Best Things to Do in Gainesville, Texas

A city run zoo of about 130 animals, which is the right size for a morning with small children and honest about what it is. The African savannah section is the reason to come. An elevated boardwalk puts you level with reticulated giraffes, zebras and ostriches moving around a shared habitat, and the giraffe encounter lets you hand feed from that deck for a few dollars, cash, weather permitting.

The name belongs to Frank Buck, born in a Gainesville wagon yard in 1884 and raised in Dallas, who became the animal collector behind Bring Em Back Alive and one of the better known Americans of the 1930s. The zoo grew out of the Gainesville Community Circus and later took his name. Admission runs $9 for ages 13 to 54, $7.50 for ages 2 to 12, seniors and military, and free under 23 months.

The building is the exhibit as much as anything in it. Gainesville put it up in 1884 as a combined city hall, fire station and calaboose, and it was headed for demolition in 1966 before local citizens formed the Cooke County Heritage Society to stop it. Granville Morton, a Dallas businessman who grew up here, and his wife Gladys paid for the renovation. It opened as a museum in 1968.

Inside, architectural pieces salvaged from other local buildings were worked into the fabric, including a Victorian stained glass skylight taken from the home of US Senator Joseph Weldon Bailey. Exhibits rotate every two or three months on themes that have ranged from the Civil War to baseball to the Gainesville Community Circus. Admission is by donation, and the staff will help with genealogy research.

Built in 1902 in reddish orange brick with curvilinear gables, stone trim and a Ludowici tile roof, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. The first floor holds a branch of the Morton Museum with railroad, Harvey House, Coca-Cola and Gainesville Community Circus material. The second floor has a replica of the Harvey House employee quarters alongside city offices.

It is still a working station. Passenger service stopped in 1979 and came back in 1999 with Amtrak's Heartland Flyer, which runs between Fort Worth and Oklahoma City and stops here. During the Second World War this depot was one of the busiest points in North Texas because of Camp Howze outside town.

The Dallas firm of Lang and Witchell designed the current Cooke County Courthouse, a Beaux Arts building in brick and limestone with terra cotta ornamentation, eagle brackets and a copper clad dome. Construction started in 1910 and finished in the early 1910s. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1988 and added to the National Register in 1991.

The square around it is the other half of the visit. California, Dixon, Main and Commerce hold antique dealers, art galleries, jewellers, gift shops, tearooms and hometown diners, and it is walkable in an hour. Two other entries on this list, the Morton Museum and Butterfield Stage, are a couple of blocks off it.

Gainesville has welcomed Medal of Honor recipients annually since 2001, and it is the only official Medal of Honor Host City in the country. The 2026 gathering was the 25th. That is a genuinely unusual civic commitment for a town of 17,000 and it shapes the place more than a visitor would guess.

The park is the physical form of it, set at a gateway into the city. A granite monument carries a bronze eagle holding the ribbon and medals in its talons, with a waterfall, gardens and benches around it. It costs nothing and takes fifteen minutes, and it is the one stop here that explains why the town looks the way it does.

Rodger Boyce, Tom Carson and Monica Hess started Butterfield Stage Players in 1979 to give Cooke County a community theatre, and it has run continuously since. It performs in Gainesville's historic former Carnegie Library, and the seats in the house were salvaged from the Cooke County Courthouse, which is a nice piece of recycling for a theatre two blocks from the courthouse.

The season splits between main stage productions and a youth theatre programme for ages 7 to 17, plus one off events. On a night when something is running it is the reason to stay in town for dinner rather than driving back to Denton.

Hubert M. Moss Lake was built in 1962 as Gainesville's drinking water supply and now does most of its work as a fishing lake. It covers about 1,190 acres with a maximum depth near 50 feet, and it holds three species of bass, largemouth, spotted and white, along with catfish, crappie and sunfish. The drive out FM 1201 is ten miles of decent countryside.

The city operates two public boat ramps. Any boat on the lake needs a city permit, which runs $35 and is valid from purchase to the end of that calendar year, not for twelve months. Camping on city property and at the public ramps is prohibited, so this is a day trip unless you have rented privately.

This is not in Gainesville and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Johnson Branch is in Valley View, about twenty miles south down I-35, and it is the northern unit of Ray Roberts Lake State Park on a 29,000 acre lake. It is also the closest thing to a proper outdoor day that Cooke County can offer a visitor, which is why it is here.

The swim beach is large and sits inside a cove, which makes it one of the better state park swims in North Texas. Dogwood Canyon Trail runs about 4.5 miles round trip through woods, and a paved 2.8 mile loop suits bikes and strollers. Camping, paddling, horseback riding and fishing all work here. Entry is $7 a day for adults and free for children 12 and under.