Somewhere around 1921, on the southwest corner of Fort Worth Pike and Chalk Hill Road in West Oak Cliff, Jesse G. Kirby started carrying pork sandwiches out to people sitting in their cars.
That corner sat past the edge of Dallas back then. Fort Worth Pike is Davis Street now. Most histories put the opening in September 1921, though court records from a lawsuit a few years later list April 15, 1922. Nobody involved seems to have thought they were making history, so nobody wrote the date down carefully.
Kirby figured people loved their cars and plenty of them would rather stay in them to eat. So he sent the food out to the curb. The young men who ran those orders became known as carhops, and Kirby’s Pig Stand is widely credited as the first drive-in restaurant in America.
The sandwich that paid for all of it was the Pig Sandwich, Tennessee-style barbecued pork finished with a sour pickle relish. Kirby and his partner, Dr. Reuben Jackson, sold an astonishing number of them. A 1924 company ad claimed the ten Dallas stands were moving 50,000 sandwiches a week, in a city of roughly a quarter million people. Texas Monthly barbecue editor Daniel Vaughn found that ad while researching his history of the Pig Stands, which is still the best deep read on the chain. We took a look 11 years ago.
Kirby opened his second stand closer to the center of town, at Zang and Bishop, the stretch now called Colorado Boulevard. By 1925 the company was selling franchises, and Kirby had a pitch for would-be owners: “Give a little pig a chance, and it will make a hog of itself.”
It worked. When the second Howard Johnson’s opened as a franchise in 1932, there were already more than a hundred Pig Stands. A pork sandwich operation out of Dallas had figured out the modern restaurant chain years before the name most people credit with it.
Kirby didn’t live to see most of that. In April 1926 he fell ill on a train to St. Louis and died of pneumonia. His wife, Shirley, kept the company running with Jackson, and both of their sons went into the restaurant business.
Success brought copycats. Unaffiliated pig stands started showing up all over Dallas, and when the company sued one of them, the Dixiepig Stand, it lost. So the Pig Stand set itself apart with architecture. The company hired F.J. Woerner, the architect who designed the Stoneleigh Hotel, to create a signature building drivers could pick out from down the road.
The Depression pulled the chain back to Texas, though the kitchens kept experimenting. Stands went to 24-hour service and added fried half chickens, tamales, enchiladas and hamburger steak with creole sauce.
This is also where the Pig Stand’s most famous claims come from. According to company lore, a short-order cook at a Dallas stand in the 1920s battered a slice of onion, dropped it in the fryer, and gave the world fried onion rings. The company also claimed the first chicken fried steak sandwich, a fried cube steak pressed between two pieces of toast.
Then there’s Texas toast, the one claim with a name attached. Royce Hailey started as a Pig Stand carhop in Dallas in 1930. By the early 1940s he was running the Beaumont stands, and he asked the bakery to cut the bread thicker. The result went on the menu as Texas toast at the stand on Calder Avenue.
None of these firsts can be proven beyond argument, and food historians still debate all of them. The company stood behind every one.
With Texas Chicken Fried Steak Day coming up on October 26, that sandwich deserves its due. It may be the most Texas thing ever handed through a car window.
Dallas grew up with these stands. The location list Vaughn pieced together reads like a map of the old city: No. 4 at 3715 Greenville, No. 15 at McKinney and Knox, No. 25 at Gaston and Grand, No. 28 at 1611 Forest Avenue, No. 38 at 4017 Oak Lawn. Plenty of longtime Dallas residents can still point to the corner where theirs stood.
One of the better family stories comes out of No. 4 on Greenville. B.J. Kirby was three when his father died. He started working at that stand at eleven and was running it by 24. In 1954, when Highway 75 pulled the traffic off Greenville Avenue, he closed for a week and reopened it as Kirby’s Charcoal Steaks. That restaurant was later sold to the group that built it into the Kirby’s Steakhouse chain.
Jackson died in 1955, and Hailey, the former carhop, took over the company. When the Pig Stand turned 40 in 1961, it had 23 restaurants, every one of them in Texas. By then Sonic was coming out of Oklahoma with speaker boxes and quicker service, and the old curbside model was slipping. Hailey converted some stands to a burger concept and handed the company to his son Richard in 1983.
Two years later Dallas lost its last one. Pig Stand No. 50, at Abrams Road and Northwest Highway, closed on August 25, 1985. The city where the drive-in started no longer had a Pig Stand.
The chain held on in San Antonio, Houston and Beaumont, and in 1992 it took the Hard Rock Cafe to court over the name Pig Sandwich and won. After a Chapter 11 filing in 2005, though, the last two company locations closed on November 14, 2006.
One kept going on its own. Mary Ann Hill, who started working at the Pig Stand as a teenager in 1967 and later managed No. 29 on Broadway in San Antonio, bought that restaurant and ran it independently for years. It closed in March 2023 after more than a century on Broadway. This past May, crews demolished the building to make way for a hotel.
So there is no Pig Stand left to visit. The drive-thru lane, the carhop at the Sonic, the onion rings in the basket and the thick slab of toast riding alongside a chicken fried steak all trace back, in Pig Stand legend anyway, to a pork sandwich stand on the far edge of Oak Cliff, a hundred and some years ago.
