Judge Roy Bean’s original saloon and courthouse, a lightly built, two-room structure of wood with a front porch stands in a courtyard behind a more substantial Texas Department of Transportation Travel Information Center and an extensive desert-plant garden. Bean’s opera house is also on display, a small, hipped-roofed frame structure with a wraparound porch.
Bean, a native of Kentucky, fought along with his two brothers in the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848 and later lived (at times either as a lawman or as an outlaw) in northern Mexico, in eastern New Mexico, and in San Antonio. In 1882, when construction of the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway was nearing the Pecos River, he operated a tent-saloon near what became the town of Vinegarroon. Crime was so rampant in the camps that the Texas Rangers were called in, and Bean was appointed justice of the peace, so that the Rangers could avoid the 320-mile round trip from Fort Stockton. He held that post, with brief interruptions, until his death in 1903. Bean settled in Langtry (named for a railroad construction foreman, George Langtry, not, as Bean later claimed, for the actress Lillie Langtry), where he became famous for the capriciousness of his legal rulings and skill at self-promotion that has made him part of Texas folklore, including a television series, Judge Roy Bean (1955–1956), and a movie, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972).