The Best Things to Do in Sherman, Texas

This is the single strongest reason to point a car at Sherman. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service administers 11,320 acres here for migratory birds and wildlife, and every acre of it, the trails and the butterfly garden included, is open to the public free of charge, every day of the year, sunrise to sunset.

The 7.5 mile auto tour loop is the way in if you only have an hour. It runs past the site of the old town of Hagerman, wildlife food plots, managed wetlands, prairie and the Lake Texoma shoreline, and there is an audio narrative keyed to the stops that you can play from the car. The refuge does not hide the fact that oil and gas production is still active on the property. Two large pump jacks stand at the end of Plover Road and fenced wells sit near the end of each auto tour stop, which is a genuinely unusual thing to see on federal refuge land.

The Texas Commission on the Arts voted in September 2018 to designate Sherman an official Texas Cultural District, and the city marked it with a ceremony on 30 November 2018 with the commission's executive director, Gary Gibbs, present. The district has pulled four state grants since. The most recent funded a set of sculptures of birds that are native to Sherman or migrate through it, a direct nod to Hagerman. Five were unveiled at the first Sherman Bird Festival on 16 May 2026 and stayed downtown as permanent public art.

The courthouse at the center is the seventh building to serve Grayson County. Voelcker and Dixon designed it in the Moderne style and it went up in 1935 and 1936 as a Public Works Administration project, after a lynch mob burned the 1876 courthouse on 9 May 1930 during the Sherman riot. Across Travis Street, Kelly Square at 115 S Travis holds antique dealers, a barbershop, a spa and places to eat inside one connected historic block.

The building is the point before you even get to the collection. It is a Carnegie library built in 1914 with Carnegie Foundation money, and it is one of a handful of Carnegie library buildings still standing in Texas. The city leased it to a group of citizens who founded the museum in 1976 out of concern that local heritage was disappearing, and volunteers ran the place until the first trained museum staff were hired in the late 1980s.

Downstairs is permanent. The Texoma Time Traveler, a Farm and Ranch Room, a reconstructed old-time general store, Native American artifacts, and a display working through the seven courthouses of Grayson County, which pairs neatly with standing in front of the current one. The upstairs gallery rotates, and past shows have covered the Civil War, the Interurban railway and the Texas cowboy. Admission is a few dollars and has been set higher for special exhibits, so call before you count on a figure.

Sherman had essentially no mountain biking a decade ago. The mountain bike publication Singletracks ran a feature on how Binkley took the city from a trail desert to a regional riding destination, and the reporting is not generous puffery. It notes that the whole town sits on a few hundred feet of relief, which is exactly why what got built here is impressive. The park now carries more than six miles of trail, a VeloSolutions pump track and a rock-armored jump line, with wooden ladders, drops and berms spread through the woods. The Dallas Off Road Bicycle Association maintains the trails alongside Sherman Parks and Rec.

Two tunnels under W Center Street connect Binkley to Herman Baker Park, so you never cross traffic on a bike. Ride the pair as a loop and AllTrails clocks it at about 6.4 miles and roughly two hours, mostly shaded, along creeks and around the lake. It is multi-use, and the Herman Baker side has no trail signage, so hikers come at you from both directions.

Bill Collins III founded this in 2010 and it should not be as good as it is for a town of 45,000. It occupies the 1924 Masonic temple, and inside are instruments and memorabilia tied to Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Maynard Ferguson and Doc Severinsen, stacks of vinyl that run into the thousands, vintage phonograph and recording equipment, and rooms carrying oversized murals. Admission is free.

It is a real museum rather than a curiosity, and the University of North Texas carries it as a partner on the Portal to Texas History. The catch is access. It opens for tours on Thursday afternoons, with some Saturdays added, and it closes entirely for January and August.

A Texas Historical Commission marker lays out the origin. Sherman citizens formed a little theater in December 1925, with architect Rollin M. Rolfe as first president alongside Austin College professor Francis Emerson and businessman James Fant. The first production, Old Man Minick, opened in early 1926, and that same year the group took first place at the state's first little theater competition in Dallas with Moontide.

The company incorporated as the Sherman Community Players in 1950 and built the Finley Playhouse on this site in 1954, later the Finley Cultural Center, with the Honey McGee playhouse added by 2000. It describes itself as the third oldest community theater in Texas and is now selling Season 78 memberships. The Addams Family runs in October 2026 and It's a Wonderful Life in December 2026.

This is the one nobody tells you about. A Touch of Class Antique Mall fills the Art Deco Hall Furniture Building across from the courthouse, 38,000 square feet over three floors with more than 70 dealers, trading since 1997 and carried in the Sherman Chamber's member directory. Climb to the third floor and there is a 2,500 square foot museum, opened in 1998 and free to walk through.

The exhibits run local railroad and commercial history, Native American material, antique typewriters and telephones, historical toys and Civil War weapons, plus a section on Teddy Roosevelt's 1905 visit to Sherman. It also keeps the longest opening hours of any museum in town by a wide margin, seven days a week, which matters in a city where the other three museums between them are open on four days.

Sherman's answer to a rained-out afternoon or a carload of teenagers. The complex runs an eight screen dine-in cinema with fully reclining electric seats, twenty lanes of bowling including six private lanes, a full service restaurant and bar, and an arcade of more than fifty games that takes in virtual reality, axe throwing, a ropes course and rock walls.

The Schulman family says it has been in Texas entertainment since 1926, which is the company's own account of itself rather than something we could confirm independently. What is checkable is what the building does now, and there is nothing else in Grayson County that stacks this much in one place.

Jeremy and Natalie Roberts started building this in 2011 and opened the doors in June 2013 with The Chosen One coconut ale and Roo's Red Ale. Jeremy is still the head brewer. A kitchen followed in 2018. The flagship is Sasquatch, an imperial chocolate milk stout that the brewery credits with a silver medal at the 2015 Great American Beer Festival.

The move downtown is what makes it worth a stop rather than a detour. KXII and KTEN both covered the end of the twelve year run on South Elm Street and the reopening in the Kreager Building at 221 W Houston, a structure well over a hundred years old that older residents still know as the Kreager food store. The new taproom opened in early June 2025 and serves pizza, burgers and sandwiches alongside the beer.

The city aquatic center in Fairview Park, and the reason Sherman families do not drive to Denison in July. It carries two two-story water slides, a drop slide, a diving board, a 1,200 foot current channel and a separate tot zone with a small slide, tumble buckets and spray features.

Admission is single digits per person with the youngest children free alongside a paying adult, though the published figures differ between the parks department page and the aggregators, so treat the parks page as the one that counts. Daily hours also shift through the season, opening around midday on weekdays and earlier at the weekend.