We can't count all the ways we love the Lone Star State, but here are a few impressive quantifications nonetheless.
Did you know that the San Jacinto Monument outside of Houston, Texas, is the tallest monument in the world, eclipsing even that of the Washington Monument in Washington D.C.? Here, read about that and even more stats Texans are proud to tout.
820 feet: Palo Duro Canyon’s average depth.
308 feet: Overall height of the State Capitol building, making it taller than the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C.
25,000 pounds: Total weight of Big Tex, the 55-foot-tall mascot of the State Fair of Texas. That’s 19,000 pounds heavier and 3 feet taller than the original Big Tex, which was destroyed by an electrical fire in 2012.
4.8 million: Number of pixels in the 20,633.64-square-foot “Big Hoss” video board at the Texas Motor Speedway, which in 2014 outsized the Dallas Cowboys’ 11,520-square-foot video board at AT&T Stadium in Arlington — and every other HD screen in the world.
8 kilometers per second: Velocity to which projectiles can be accelerated by the Light-Gas Gun at the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Sciences Directorate’s Experimental Impact Laboratory at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. That’s 17,895.5 mph, or 26,246.7 feet per second.
570 feet: Height of the San Jacinto Monument, the tallest stone column memorial structure in the world, commemorating the Texas Revolution’s Battle of San Jacinto. It’s 15 feet taller than the Washington Memorial in Washington, D.C.
1744: Year the foundation was laid for the mission San Antonio de Valero, which would come to be known as Pueblo de la Compañia del Álamo and eventually just the Alamo. The Battle of the Alamo, the most famous of the Texas Revolution, was March 6, 1836.
Two: Number of times per day cowhands drive the Fort Worth Herd through the Fort Worth Stockyards (at 11:30 a.m. and 4 p.m.) on East Exchange Avenue. &
15 acres: Size of Dealey Plaza Historic District in Dallas, the site of the John F. Kennedy assassination and birthplace of countless conspiracy theories.
Photography (From top): Courtesy Texas Legislature Online, courtesy Palo Duro Canyon State Park
