Category Archives: museums

Life and Death on the Border, 1910-1920

20160314_094849Not too long ago, I read about an exhibit at the Bullock State History Museum over at Frontier Partisans.  Yes, a guy in Texas heard about an exhibit in Texas from a guy in Oregon.  I’ve got to start paying better attention.

Anyway, I managed to get away over Spring Break a few weeks ago to see the exhibit.  I’d like to thank Jim Cornelius for putting it on my radar.I wanted to make sure I had enough time to see everything, so I decided to stay overnight and catch the exhibit the next morning when the museum opened.  I popped a Tom Russell CD in the player to set the mood and hit the road.

Not only was the exhibit great, but I saw some other great exhibits, visited some small town cemeteries, ate some great Mexican food, spent way too much time and money in second hand bookstores, and should get at least six blog posts out of the trip.  (The first one on the Frank Frazetta exhibit is here.)

20160314_090333I’d never been to the Bullock Museum before.  This trip won’t be my last.  I spent half the day there, and there were some exhibits I skipped, like the food exhibit.  It was making me hungry.

The exhibit I went to see was in the rotunda, which you can see in the photo on the left.  It’s on the level with the top row windows.  Much of the lighting was from the Sun shining in, so some of the pictures that follow will have some contrast to them.  I apologize for the glare in some of the photos, as I was not able to get a clear shot because of the lighting.

Also, this is an extremely long post.  My intention here is to allow anyone who would have liked to see the exhibit but wasn’t able to attend to experience as much of the exhibit as possible.  I’ve tried to summarize the information in a coherent fashion. Continue reading

A Visit to the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum, Pt. 1

20160213_123853Last weekend, my son had an academic competition in Canyon, Texas. The competition was held on the campus of West Texas A&M University. I went along to cheer him and his team on, and while I was there I took advantange of some time when the kids weren’t competing to slip over to the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum, which is on the campus. It’s the largest historical musueum in the state, with museum being defined as a facility which houses indoor exhibits. And places like the National Ranching Heritage Center, which has a number of reconstructed buildings, don’t fall under this definition.20160213_123917-2

I didn’t have time to see everything. There are two floors, plus a basement. There are fossils, old cars, windmills, a frontier town, pottery, swords, natural history displays, and that’s just the basement and the ground floor. I had just gotten to the second floor and was looking at the firearm display when the teacher accompanying the students texted me to say they were leaving. So, I’m going to show you some of the things I saw in several installments. Click the photos for a larger view.

This post is going to focus on what I saw of the firearm exhibit, which won’t be everything.  I snapped this group of pictures in a hurry since we were leaving, and some of them didn’t turn out quite as clear as I thought once I looked at them carefully.  I intend to go back and take my time walking through the museum at some future date and get a better set of pictures. Continue reading