A Tower That Should Fall — But Never Will
Driving east into the town of Groom on Historic Route 66 across the flat Texas Panhandle, something appears on the right side of the frontage road that takes a moment to process. A steel water tower, 75 feet tall, is standing at an angle that looks unmistakably wrong — two of its four legs are hovering in the air, and the whole structure leans toward the road as if it has just decided to collapse in the direction of approaching traffic. Every first-time visitor experiences the same involuntary reaction: a slight tightening of the grip on the wheel and the thought that something terrible is about to happen.
Nothing terrible is about to happen. Nothing has been about to happen here since the early 1980s, when Ralph Britten — a Groom-born World War II veteran, Army Air Corps engineer, cattleman, and thoroughly American entrepreneur — deliberately tilted this tower at a five-degree angle, painted “Britten U.S.A.” across its tank in red, white, and blue, and placed it next to the frontage road of Route 66 in Texas to lure passing motorists into his truck stop and restaurant. His son Vince, who was about 18 years old when his father installed the tower, put the strategy simply: “He set the hook, and travelers took the bait.”
The Tower Fuel Stop burned down in 1988 and was never rebuilt. Ralph Britten moved to Amarillo, where he bought and sold farm equipment until his death in 2000. The tower remained, leaning at the same angle it has occupied for four decades, serving no purpose whatsoever except to make every driver on I-40 and Historic Route 66 do a double-take and, in a satisfying number of cases, pull over to take a photograph. It is, as Nick Gerlich, Ph.D., a Route 66 historian and marketing professor at nearby West Texas A&M University, has said: “Ralph Britten was a marketing genius, even if he didn’t go to school to learn it.”
The Leaning Water Tower of Groom — known variously as the Leaning Tower of Britten, the Leaning Tower of Texas, and the Britten USA Tower — is one of the most-photographed roadside curiosities on the Texas stretch of the Mother Road. It appears in Route 66 photography books, travel guides, and social media feeds from every corner of the world. It is listed on Roadside America. It has been drawing involuntary brake-pressings from startled travelers for more than forty years. And it will keep drawing them for as long as the buried braces that hold its airborne legs in place remain in the Panhandle soil.
Where Is the Leaning Water Tower?
The Britten Leaning Water Tower is located on the north frontage road of Interstate 40 / Historic Route 66, approximately 0.2 miles east of I-40 Exit 114 on the eastern edge of Groom, Texas, in Carson County. It is visible from both eastbound and westbound lanes of I-40 and from the Route 66 frontage road. From Exit 114, head east on the frontage road and the tower will be immediately visible on the right (north) side of the road. A small gravel pull-off is available for parking and photographs.
Groom is located approximately 40 miles east of Amarillo and 52 miles west of Shamrock, putting it near the center of Route 66’s Texas Panhandle corridor. The tower sits on the eastern approach to Groom, making it the first major landmark travelers encounter when entering from the east — and the last they see when leaving toward the Oklahoma border. The Groom Cross — the 190-foot steel monument on the western side of town — sits approximately 3 miles to the west at Exit 112.
The tower is free to view and photograph at any hour. It is accessible year-round and requires no admission, no reservation, and no advance planning beyond taking the correct exit. The stop takes five minutes if you just want the photograph, or longer if you want to walk around the base and examine the engineering up close.
The Town That Built a Legend: Groom, Texas
Colonel B.B. Groom, the Francklyn Ranch, and the Railroad Town of 1902
The town of Groom takes its name from Colonel B.B. Groom, a Kentucky cattle breeder who in 1882 leased nearly 600,000 acres of Texas Panhandle land from the New York and Texas Land Company, organizing what he called the Francklyn Land and Cattle Company with ambitions to build the finest cattle operation in America. He imported polled Angus from Scotland and shorthorns from Kentucky, drilled wells, and built out the infrastructure of a model ranch. Then the brutal winter of 1886 hit, and the company went bankrupt shortly after. The colonel’s operation was reorganized as the White Deer Lands Trust, which brought in settlers and sold land.
In 1902, when the Chicago, Rock Island and Gulf Railway laid its tracks westward across Carson County, a townsite was established at a siding on the old Francklyn Ranch land. Local landowner W.S. Wilkerson laid out the town and named it Groom — in honor of the colonel whose ranch had given the landscape its first structure. The same year, Frank S. Dysart opened the first general store and post office. By 1906 the town had a barbershop, bank, hotel, lumberyard, and school. It was incorporated in 1911 with more than 250 residents. Notably, the Britten family — whose water tower would define Groom’s visual identity eight decades later — were among the directors of Groom’s State National Bank, founded in 1904.
Route 66 and the Golden Era
When U.S. Route 66 was commissioned in 1926 through the Texas Panhandle, it passed through Groom along what is now the I-40 Business Route. The highway transformed the town into a traveler’s service hub, and at the height of the Route 66 era Groom supported 16 service stations, multiple motels, cafes, a movie theater, and car dealerships — more gas stations per capita than any other community in the Panhandle. The town’s population peaked at 808 in 1972.
To the east of Groom, travelers on the early highway had to navigate the Jericho Gap — a notorious 18-mile stretch of unpaved black-soil road that turned into an impassable mud trap in wet weather, stranding vehicles and generating steady business for Groom’s service stations and tow operators. Making it through the Gap and into Groom was a genuine relief for early Route 66 travelers, and the town’s businesses benefited accordingly. The Gap was eventually bypassed and paved, but it left Groom with a generations-long reputation as the town that stood between travelers and the worst stretch of the Texas Panhandle highway.
The Bypass and the Britten Family’s Role in Groom History
The construction of Interstate 40 through the Panhandle in the 1960s and 1970s bypassed Groom’s downtown, though the old Route 66 alignment was retained as the I-40 Business Route. The Britten family had been part of Groom’s civic fabric since the town’s earliest years — they helped found its bank. By the early 1980s, when Ralph Britten was planning his truck stop, the community was adjusting to the new traffic patterns of the interstate era. His water tower was, in its own unconventional way, a piece of Groom’s response to that challenge: a determined, inventive attempt to pull drivers off the high-speed road and into the old town that the highway had bypassed.
Ralph Britten: The Man Who Made a Water Tower Famous
Born in Groom, Tested by War
Ralph Clifton Britten was born in Groom, Texas, in 1923 — the year the town was approaching its early prosperity as a Route 66 precursor community on the Panhandle railroad line. He grew up in Groom, attended Groom High School where he was captain of the football team and lettered in basketball in 1939, and worked on the family stock farm until World War II intervened. He served as an Army Air Corps engineer and top turret gunner in the Eighth Air Force Bomber Station in England, for which he received the Distinguished Flying Cross. He came home to Groom with the military engineering skills he would eventually apply — in a considerably more whimsical context — to a leaning water tower on the Texas Panhandle.
The Entrepreneur Returns to Groom
After the war, Britten became a cattleman and a patron of the Amarillo Livestock Auction, working in the agricultural economy that had always been the Panhandle’s foundation. In the early 1980s, he decided to open a truck stop and restaurant in Groom on the frontage road of Route 66 / I-40 — a business model that had sustained Groom through its Route 66 golden era and that still held promise for the steady flow of interstate traffic.
For the new truck stop, Britten needed a water supply. He learned that the nearby town of Lefors, Texas — about 30 miles west in Gray County — had a water tower it was putting out to auction; the tower had failed to meet updated building codes and was scheduled for demolition. Britten bid on it and acquired the structure for approximately $1,000. His son Vince, the youngest of eight Britten children and about 18 years old at the time, recalls that the plan was straightforward: buy the tower, move it to Groom, use it for water storage. What happened next was considerably more interesting.
The Move: 30 Miles Across the Panhandle
Getting a 75-foot-tall, 22-foot-wide steel water tower 30 miles from Lefors to Groom was not a simple operation. The Brittens lowered the tower onto its side using a crane, then hauled it horizontally on a flatbed trailer across farmland and dirt roads, opening fences and reassembling them as they went. “That was quite a task, just to move it 30 miles,” Vince Britten remembered. The journey took several days.
Once the tower arrived in Groom, it spent the next two years lying on its side while the family completed construction of the truck stop. Vince helped apply the original paint while the structure was still horizontal. Even then, before it was upright, it was attracting attention: CB radio conversations among truckers driving past the site on I-40 constantly referenced the sideways tower, speculating about what had knocked it over. When Ralph finally stood the tower upright at its new location, the CB chatter stopped. Nobody talked about an upright water tower. That observation gave Britten the idea.
The Engineering of the Lean: How Britten Made It Work
Ralph Britten’s military engineering background gave him the knowledge to do what a layperson could not have done safely: tilt a 75-foot steel water tower at a deliberate angle and keep it stable for decades. The solution was elegant in the way that practical engineering problems often are when solved by someone who understands what they’re actually doing.
The Kickstand Principle
A standard water tower has four legs that anchor it to the ground. Those legs are connected by horizontal braces, or crossbars, that extend outward past the legs along the ground for 25 to 30 feet — functioning like outriggers to distribute the load. When Britten wanted to create the lean, he anchored two of the four legs to concrete footings in the ground. For the other two legs, he dug trenches for the outrigger crossbars to settle into and then used construction equipment to lift those two legs off the ground, letting the crossbars bear the load in the trenches. Those crossbars were covered with dirt. The two airborne legs were cut off on the elevated side and left hovering 2 to 3 feet off the ground — one slightly higher than the other. The buried crossbars function exactly like the kickstand on a bicycle: invisible from the outside, doing all the work.
The final lean is approximately five degrees from vertical — enough to make the tower look dramatically wrong from a distance, but not so extreme as to create structural instability. The buried braces have held for more than forty years of Panhandle winds, temperature extremes, and the gradual settling of the soil beneath them. The tower is not in danger of falling. It has never been in danger of falling. That is precisely the point.
The Water Question
One persistent piece of local mythology holds that Britten partially filled the tank with water to shift the center of gravity over the two supporting legs and prevent the tower from toppling. According to his son Vince and other family members, this is not accurate: the family never filled the tower with water for balance. “If there’s any water in there, it’s because it rained,” Vince has said, adding that the tank is primarily filled with accumulated pigeon excrement. The tower’s stability comes entirely from the buried crossbars — not from any hydraulic engineering.
“Anyone Can Have a Water Tower, But His Was Going to Lean”
The phrase is from Melanie Britten, a family member who wrote to Roadside America in 2017 explaining the tower’s origin. It captures something essential about Ralph Britten’s approach: he was not interested in a water tower as a utilitarian object. He was interested in a water tower as a statement. “Instead of wasting it, Ralph decided that anyone can have a water tower, but his was going to lean.” The lettering he chose for the tank — “Britten U.S.A.” in patriotic red, white, and blue — was his name and his country, staked out on the Panhandle sky. Not the name of his business. His name.
The Tower Fuel Stop: When the Marketing Worked
The Tower Fuel Stop that Ralph Britten built alongside the leaning tower was, by his family’s accounts and those of travelers who stopped there, a genuinely successful roadside business. The tower did exactly what it was designed to do: made drivers on I-40 and Route 66 wonder what on earth they were looking at, pull off to investigate, and find themselves at Britten’s truck stop, where the gas and food that they had perhaps not realized they needed were available.
Britten had a stock response for the drivers who rushed in alarmed. Vince Britten recalled his father telling the story of panicked motorists bursting through the door: “Your tower’s about to fall!” And Britten would reply: “Relax. It’s always been that way. Why don’t you sit down and get something to eat?”
The Tower Fuel Stop sign carried its own miniature version of the leaning tower on top — a meta-joke that doubled the effect. The sign with the small tilted tower was its own advertisement for the large tilted tower, which was itself the advertisement for the sign. It was roadside marketing operating at the level of pure folk art.
The Fire and Its Aftermath
In 1988, an electrical fire started in the kitchen of the Tower Fuel Stop and burned the building to the ground. Vince Britten has described the insurance situation with characteristic Texas directness: “Insurance was so outrageously high, being out there, he decided not to insure it one year. It burned down six months later.” The fire also destroyed most of the photographs documenting the tower’s move from Lefors to Groom — a significant loss to the documentary record of one of Route 66’s better-documented quirky landmarks.
Ralph Britten did not rebuild the truck stop. He moved to Amarillo and returned to trading farm equipment until his death in 2000. He was buried at Saint Mary’s Cemetery in Groom. He had wanted to be buried under the water tower, but as Vince explains, “it turns out you can’t just be buried anywhere you want to be buried.” His monument is the tower.
Since the fire, a small remaining portion of the old truck stop site has operated as a local truck repair shop — a faint echo of the automotive services Britten provided. But the physical plant of the Tower Fuel Stop is gone. The parking lot was paved over to create the I-40 service road. What remains is an open field with the leaning tower at its center, exactly as Ralph left it, doing exactly what it was always designed to do.
The Tower Today: Family Legacy and Panhandle Icon
The Britten family has maintained ownership of the tower since Ralph’s death. His children — including Vince, the youngest of eight — repaint the tower every few years to keep it in condition. A cousin, John Britten, takes particular care of the “Britten U.S.A.” lettering, keeping it crisp and legible. During Christmas, the city of Groom lights the large multicolored star mounted on top of the tower — a seasonal tradition that turns the tower into a community landmark as well as a roadside attraction.
The tower has accumulated a substantial archive of documentation over the decades. Images of the Britten tower appear in major Route 66 photography books, travel guides, and countless personal travel blogs and social media accounts. Roadside America rates it “Worth a Detour.” It has been featured in Texas Highways magazine, which described it as a “roadside oddity” and a monument to “his off-kilter sense of outdoor advertising.” Travelers consistently note in reviews that the tower looks more dramatic in person than in photographs, partly because the flat Panhandle terrain gives it nothing to compete with for visual attention.
The Physics Paradox That Keeps People Stopping
What makes the tower so effective as an attention-grabber, four decades after its installation, is the same thing that made it effective in 1982: it violates an expectation. Water towers are supposed to be vertical. The human visual system is calibrated to detect verticality in tall structures. When a structure that is supposed to be vertical is not, the brain registers a problem before the conscious mind has time to formulate what the problem is. The driver’s foot eases off the accelerator. The head turns. The phone comes out. Even experienced Route 66 travelers who have seen photographs of the tower consistently report a moment of visual surprise when they first encounter it at highway speed.
The Atlas Obscura entry for the tower notes that travelers over the years have proposed various explanations for the lean: a crashing plane, an earthquake, a tornado. None of these are correct. The explanation is a former Army Air Corps engineer with a billboard budget of approximately $1,000, a good understanding of how crossbars work under tensile load, and the conviction that “anyone can have a water tower, but his was going to lean.”
Groom’s Two Giants: The Tower and the Cross
Groom, Texas — population approximately 552 in the 2020 census — is the only town on Route 66 in Texas that contains two large-scale roadside landmarks of genuinely distinctive character. The Groom Cross — the 190-foot Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ, built by Steve Thomas in 1995 — sits on the western side of town at I-40 Exit 112, approximately three miles from the leaning tower at Exit 114. The two structures are separated by the entire width of Groom’s modest downtown, and together they bracket the community with landmarks that could scarcely be more different in character, scale, intention, or visual effect.
The cross was built to be visible from 20 miles away and to command spiritual attention. The tower was built to be visible from the frontage road and to make drivers laugh and pull over. One is an act of public faith by a man who wanted to speak to the world without traveling. The other is an act of commercial wit by a man who wanted travelers to stop for gas and a sandwich. Both have outlasted the immediate purposes for which they were built. Both are now permanent features of the Groom landscape. Neither is going anywhere.
For Route 66 travelers, the double stop in Groom — tower on the east side, cross on the west — makes the town one of the most compact and rewarding combinations of roadside experience on the entire Texas Panhandle corridor. Allow 30 minutes for the tower (with photographs) and another 30 to 60 minutes for the cross and its Stations of the Cross path. Together, they represent Groom’s complete and entirely unplanned answer to the question of what keeps Route 66 travelers stopping in small towns.
Practical Information for Visiting the Leaning Water Tower
Location: North frontage road of Interstate 40 / Historic Route 66, approximately 0.2 miles east of I-40 Exit 114, on the eastern edge of Groom, Texas, Carson County. The tower is visible from I-40 in both directions and from the frontage road.
Access: From I-40 westbound or eastbound, take Exit 114. On the north side of the freeway, head east on the frontage road. The tower is immediately visible. Pull onto the small gravel road for parking and photographs.
Hours: Open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. No gates, no entry controls. Free to visit at any time.
Admission: Free. There is no ticket booth, no donation box, and no staff. The tower is a family-owned private structure on private land, maintained as an enduring monument to Ralph Britten and as a gift to Route 66 travelers.
Time Required: Five minutes for a drive-by photograph. Fifteen to twenty minutes if you want to walk around the base, examine the engineering of the buried crossbars and airborne legs, and get multiple angles. The tower looks different from different positions — some angles show the lean more dramatically than others.
Photography: The tower photographs best in the morning or late afternoon when low-angle light creates shadow contrast on the steel. A wide-angle lens captures the full structure against the Panhandle sky. Walking around to the east or west face of the tower gives a cleaner profile shot. The old Tower Fuel Stop sign — with its miniature leaning tower on top — remains visible near the site and is worth including in the documentation.
Christmas: The city of Groom lights a large multicolored star on top of the tower during the Christmas season. If you’re traveling the Panhandle in December, it is worth timing a visit to see the illuminated star.
The Groom Cross: The Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Exit 112, approximately 3 miles west) is the natural companion stop. Allow 30–60 minutes for the cross and its Stations of the Cross path. Together, the two stops make the complete Groom Route 66 experience.
Dining in Groom: The Grill on 66 at 407 Front Street offers classic Texas diner fare — burgers, breakfasts, and home-cooked staples — in the spirit of the Route 66 roadside restaurants that Groom once had in abundance. The Den on Route 66 is a coffee shop and convenience stop on the frontage road near the tower.
Lodging: The Chalet Inn in Groom offers budget-friendly accommodations for travelers who want to stay at one of Route 66’s two-landmark towns. Amarillo (40 miles west) provides the full range of Route 66 motel options including the Big Texan Motel.
Best Season: The tower can be visited year-round, but spring (April–May) and fall (September–October) offer the most comfortable temperatures for an outdoor stop. Summer heat in the Panhandle can exceed 100°F; arrive early in the day. Winter visits have the compensation of clear skies and low-angle light that give the tower strong photographic character.
The Leaning Tower and the Spirit of Route 66 Roadside Culture
The Britten tower belongs to a specific tradition of American roadside entrepreneurship that reached its peak along Route 66 in the 1940s and 1950s: the deliberate construction of something unusual, something oversized, something wrong-seeming, as a mechanism for pulling motorists off the highway and toward a business. Muffler Men, giant fiberglass animals, buildings shaped like coffee pots and teapots, dinosaurs visible from miles away — all of these were variations on the same fundamental insight that Ralph Britten acted on in Groom: people who are bored on a long straight highway will stop for something that requires explanation.
What makes the Britten tower distinctive within this tradition is the combination of simplicity, durability, and wit. It is not a manufactured attraction designed by a commercial firm. It is a single engineering decision made by a man with a military background and a practical mind: take two legs off the ground and cover the braces with dirt. The rest — the gasping, the double-takes, the phones raised for photographs, the conversations in the truck stop about whether the tower was going to fall — all of that followed automatically from a five-degree tilt. Britten didn’t need to build a whole fake dinosaur. He just needed to make a water tower lean.
The Route 66 Centennial in 2026 — marking 100 years of the Mother Road since its commissioning on November 11, 1926 — has brought renewed attention to every landmark on the highway. The Britten tower, installed in the early 1980s when Route 66 was being officially decommissioned, is a relatively recent addition to the roadside canon: it belongs not to the classic era of the highway but to its aftermath, to the period when a small Panhandle entrepreneur decided that the road wasn’t done yet and that travelers could still be stopped with the right kind of bait. He was right. The tower is still working.
Continuing Your Route 66 Journey from Groom
Groom sits near the center of the Route 66 Texas Panhandle corridor, approximately equidistant between the Oklahoma border to the east and the New Mexico border to the west. To the east, the highway runs through McLean and on toward Shamrock. To the west it passes through Conway and into Amarillo, the Panhandle’s largest city.
The Groom Cross — Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ — Three miles west of the Leaning Tower at I-40 Exit 112, the 190-foot steel cross built by Steve Thomas in 1995 anchors the western side of Groom. One of the largest crosses in the Western Hemisphere, visible from 20 miles, and surrounded by life-size bronze Stations of the Cross sculptures. The natural companion stop to the tower — together they make the complete Groom experience.
Route 66 in McLean, Texas — Approximately 30 miles east of Groom, McLean is home to the Devil’s Rope Museum — the world’s largest barbed wire collection and the first Route 66 museum on the entire highway — plus the restored 1928 Phillips 66 station and the McLean–Alanreed Area Historical Museum.
Devil’s Rope Museum, McLean — The 2,000-variety barbed wire collection in the former bra factory on Historic Route 66, alongside the Texas Route 66 Museum’s 700+ Mother Road artifacts. Free admission.
Conway, Texas on Route 66 — Approximately 15 miles west of Groom, Conway is home to Bug Ranch — five Volkswagen Beetles buried nose-first in the Panhandle soil, the Panhandle’s answer to Cadillac Ranch.
Amarillo, Texas on Route 66 — Approximately 40 miles west, Amarillo is the major city on Texas’s Route 66 corridor, home to Cadillac Ranch, the Big Texan Steak Ranch, and the 6th Street Historic District.
Cadillac Ranch, Amarillo — The iconic public art installation just west of Amarillo where ten Cadillacs are buried nose-first in the Panhandle soil. Like Bug Ranch and like the Britten tower, a piece of Route 66 roadside culture that demands a photograph.
The Big Texan Steak Ranch, Amarillo — Route 66’s legendary 72-ounce steak challenge restaurant in Amarillo, a western-themed institution since 1960.
6th Street Historic District, Amarillo — The most intact Route 66 business corridor in Texas, lined with antique shops, neon signs, galleries, and restaurants along the original alignment.
Midpoint Café, Adrian, Texas — Approximately 90 miles west of Groom, the Midpoint Café marks the exact geographic center of Route 66 — 1,139 miles from both Chicago and Los Angeles. Famous for Ugly Crust Pies.
Route 66 in Texas — Complete Guide — The full guide to all 178 miles of the Mother Road through the Texas Panhandle, from Shamrock at the Oklahoma border to Glenrio at the New Mexico line.
Route 66 — Complete Guide — The definitive guide to all 2,448 miles of America’s Mother Road, from the Begin sign in Chicago to the End of the Trail at the Santa Monica Pier.
Route 66 Centennial 2026 — The 100th anniversary of Route 66 is November 11, 2026. The Leaning Water Tower, the Groom Cross, and the full Texas Panhandle corridor are central to the centennial celebration.
“He Set the Hook, and Travelers Took the Bait”
Ralph Britten died in 2000, and the truck stop that justified the tower’s existence burned down twelve years before that. The Leaning Water Tower of Groom has not served its original commercial purpose in nearly four decades. And yet it is still, reliably, doing the only thing Ralph Britten ever really needed it to do: stopping people.
Route 66 was always, at its core, a road designed to make stopping easy and rewarding — a highway that treated the journey as the destination and invited travelers to pull off for every diverting, curious, and unexpected thing along the way. Ralph Britten understood that. He understood it well enough to build something that costs nothing to visit, generates no ongoing revenue, requires his family to repaint it every few years, and has been making drivers slow down and reach for their cameras since Ronald Reagan was president.
That is not just good marketing. On Route 66, that is a form of public service.
