It seems each group of visitors that come to SA come bearing their own agenda about what to see, where to go. My wife and I have found that by going with the flow we see many new things as well. After we adjust their perspectives, such as no we can't drive to El Paso and back this afternoon, we usually emerge with a do-able itinerary. Recently, some old friends declared they wanted to see the Painted Church. We had no idea what these were. Turns out they are churchs whose interiors are lavishyly painted with decorations, scenes, saints and symbols. The colors are bright and the visit on a Sunday afternoon was very quiet, almost eerie in how few people were around. We saw four churchs all near Schulenberg, TX, about half-way between San Antonio and Houston.
excellent link for more information: http://www.texasescapes.com/CentralTexasTownsSouth/PaintedChurchesTour.htm
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
WEIRD TEXAS
Ghost towns
my sister and niece recently visited me in San Antonio, TX. My niece wanted to see Texas Ghost Towns. Happily, most are in far west Texas, with most of the rattlesnakes. Her request casued me to take note of this article from the Economist. East coasters have a strange idea of what Texas is like. Ghost towns, tumbleweed, not around here.
History in a half-brick
Dec 19th 2007 THURBER, TEXAS From The Economist print edition
What ruins reveal about America
LINDSAY BAKER walks through the streets of Thurber carrying a hoe. It is handy for killing rattlesnakes, which lurk in the long grass that has all but swallowed the town. He also uses it to scrape in the dirt for what the people who once lived there left behind. He finds some shards of an old medicine bottle, the cap of a salt-shaker and a half-brick with markings that date it sometime between 1904 and 1936. If a brush fire clears the grass, you'll see artefacts like this everywhere, explains Mr Baker, a historian whose boyish enthusiasm for ghost towns belies his years.
America has a lot of ghost towns. There are 1,000 in Texas alone. Thurber was once home to 10,000 people. Now there are only five. In its busy days, Thurber was a coal town. Immigrants flocked there from Italy, Poland and Mexico to dig up fuel for steam trains. The coal was also used to fire bricks made from local clay. The town boasted churches, baseball teams and even an opera house.
But then someone found oil in Texas. Before long, the trains started burning oil instead of coal. Thurber's mine closed in 1926. And since cheap oil prompted Texans to start using asphalt instead of bricks to pave their roads, Thurber's brick kiln closed, too.
The workers left. Their homes were sold for $50 to anyone who could carry them off. You can still see them in the surrounding countryside, serving as barns or storehouses. Little is left in Thurber itself but a smokestack, the graveyard (divided into Catholic, Protestant and black areas) and a few company buildings.
The story is not all wretched, however. Many workers found jobs in the oil business. The company that built Thurber struck oil and prospered. The old boss's daughter-in-law donated money for a museum to preserve Thurber's memory, which Mr Baker runs. His qualifications are ideal: besides teaching industrial history at nearby Tarleton State University, he is the author of “Ghost Towns of Texas” and “More Ghost Towns of Texas”.
Something about ghost towns grips the American imagination. They provide an eerie backdrop for movies, children's books and theme-park rides. Ghost-town enthusiasts devote countless weekends to searching out remote examples, photographing them and posting their findings on websites such as www.ghosttowns.com. Typically, they give imprecise directions so that only the most committed ghost-towners can follow their footsteps.
Ghost towns are sad places, but also monuments to American dynamism. When work moves, so do Americans. With so much space, especially in the West, it can make sense to let a town die. But its memory may live on. Ghost towns give people a tangible connection to a mysterious past, says Mr Baker. Others treat history more playfully. On a hill near Thurber, someone has built a hunting lodge in the shape of a Scottish castle.
Copyright © 2008 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
my sister and niece recently visited me in San Antonio, TX. My niece wanted to see Texas Ghost Towns. Happily, most are in far west Texas, with most of the rattlesnakes. Her request casued me to take note of this article from the Economist. East coasters have a strange idea of what Texas is like. Ghost towns, tumbleweed, not around here.
History in a half-brick
Dec 19th 2007 THURBER, TEXAS From The Economist print edition
What ruins reveal about America
LINDSAY BAKER walks through the streets of Thurber carrying a hoe. It is handy for killing rattlesnakes, which lurk in the long grass that has all but swallowed the town. He also uses it to scrape in the dirt for what the people who once lived there left behind. He finds some shards of an old medicine bottle, the cap of a salt-shaker and a half-brick with markings that date it sometime between 1904 and 1936. If a brush fire clears the grass, you'll see artefacts like this everywhere, explains Mr Baker, a historian whose boyish enthusiasm for ghost towns belies his years.
America has a lot of ghost towns. There are 1,000 in Texas alone. Thurber was once home to 10,000 people. Now there are only five. In its busy days, Thurber was a coal town. Immigrants flocked there from Italy, Poland and Mexico to dig up fuel for steam trains. The coal was also used to fire bricks made from local clay. The town boasted churches, baseball teams and even an opera house.
But then someone found oil in Texas. Before long, the trains started burning oil instead of coal. Thurber's mine closed in 1926. And since cheap oil prompted Texans to start using asphalt instead of bricks to pave their roads, Thurber's brick kiln closed, too.
The workers left. Their homes were sold for $50 to anyone who could carry them off. You can still see them in the surrounding countryside, serving as barns or storehouses. Little is left in Thurber itself but a smokestack, the graveyard (divided into Catholic, Protestant and black areas) and a few company buildings.
The story is not all wretched, however. Many workers found jobs in the oil business. The company that built Thurber struck oil and prospered. The old boss's daughter-in-law donated money for a museum to preserve Thurber's memory, which Mr Baker runs. His qualifications are ideal: besides teaching industrial history at nearby Tarleton State University, he is the author of “Ghost Towns of Texas” and “More Ghost Towns of Texas”.
Something about ghost towns grips the American imagination. They provide an eerie backdrop for movies, children's books and theme-park rides. Ghost-town enthusiasts devote countless weekends to searching out remote examples, photographing them and posting their findings on websites such as www.ghosttowns.com. Typically, they give imprecise directions so that only the most committed ghost-towners can follow their footsteps.
Ghost towns are sad places, but also monuments to American dynamism. When work moves, so do Americans. With so much space, especially in the West, it can make sense to let a town die. But its memory may live on. Ghost towns give people a tangible connection to a mysterious past, says Mr Baker. Others treat history more playfully. On a hill near Thurber, someone has built a hunting lodge in the shape of a Scottish castle.
Copyright © 2008 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
Sunday, February 3, 2008
WEIRD Texas
The UFOs are moving east!
First, Roswell. Then Marfa. Now Fort Worth!
Stephenville, Texas has had multiple sightings of UFOs in recent weeks. All this flatland and big sky just makes us irresistable to the intersteller critters!
Stephenville rides wave of publicity after UFOs
Web Posted: 01/19/2008 12:10 AM CST
Lisa SandbergExpress-News
STEPHENVILLE — All hype aside, space aliens have not invaded the streets of this rodeo town southwest of Fort Worth — though nearly everyone here is keeping at least a playful eye out for them.
And maybe no one here has encountered any little green men in the week after dozens of residents reported seeing a strobe light-flashing object zipping through the night sky because they don't exist.
Sightings from around the country suggest extraterrestrial beings are actually gray, not green, says Dennis Balthaser, a UFO researcher and former investigator with the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, N.M.
"They're somewhat humanoid looking," Balthaser says of such accounts nationally. "They have a big head, a small-frame body, anywhere between three and five fingers, no hair ... no ears as such. A slit for the mouth."
But even if there's been no space invasion of Stephenville, the recent obsession with them has been out of this world in the town of 15,400 — and far beyond.
Ken Cherry, the Texas director of the Colorado-based Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, which describes itself as devoted to research on the topic, says the multiple sightings on the night of Jan. 8 could turn Stephenville into a mini-Roswell.
"Dozens of people are coming forward, responsible people, saying they saw something," Cherry said. "We're talking shop owners, ranch owners, oil field workers, just about every demographic imaginable."
Forget being the Cowboy Capital of the World. Folks in town are calling Stephenville the UFO Capital of the World.
Angela Joiner, the only full-time reporter at the Stephenville Empire-Tribune, can hardly put out a paper. Ever since breaking the story last week, she's been swamped with calls and e-mails from around the world — from people who either want to tell her about their UFO sightings or from international media types assigned to cover the story.
"I'm not accustomed to this. I don't do this!" Joiner, who's been on the job 18 months, said with a laugh.
Perhaps the only person who gets less work done these days is the local constable, LeeRoy Gaitan. He's in demand as the only elected official who can corroborate what dozens of others saw: something spooky in the sky over Erath County that evening.
He was on foot approaching his home when in the distance he saw a red glow, not as big as a hot air balloon but big. It didn't appear to be attached to anything. He watched it awhile before it burned itself out. Then it reappeared.
"I knew this wasn't right," he said. So he went inside to summon his family. His wife gave him this "get real" look, Gaitan said, but his young son came running.
Father and son saw what looked like really bright white strobe lights, nine or 10 of them. They flashed as the minutes passed. "All of a sudden, they shot off, they traveled northeast at a real high rate of speed," Gaitan said.
Though he doesn't believe it was a spaceship, he's had to answer calls from hundreds of people from around the country who do. His solution: "I've started screening my calls," he said.
Military officials have said they had no aircraft in the area at the time of the sightings.
And the military doesn't investigate UFO sightings. So that leaves Cherry's MUFON group. Five of its investigators will descend on the area today to begin interviewing witnesses.
It won't be a quick investigation, Cherry cautions. Interviews will be conducted one on one. And even after all the anecdotes have been gathered and sifted through — don't expect physical evidence — the researchers will hedge their bets.
"We could say we eliminated every other possibility. But we never say, 'This is alien technology' or 'This is a spacecraft,'" Cherry said.
For now, people around town are having a ball.
City Secretary Cindy Stafford wore a space alien mask to the City Council this week. It was fun, she said.
Because he hasn't done the research, Roswell's Balthaser isn't ready to make any educated guesses about what might have crossed the sky in Texas. But, if the lights were a mile long and half a mile across, as some have suggested, that would be the size of a "mother ship," which is much bigger than a flying saucer, he said.
Balthaser, a retired engineer with the Texas Department of Transportation, takes his research seriously and hates when other people don't.
He probably wouldn't appreciate the T-shirts produced by the high school science club here that proclaim: 'Erath County: The New Roswell' and depict a spaceship leaving earth and towing a dairy cow.
By Friday, the club had sold 400 of them.
lsandberg@express-news.net
First, Roswell. Then Marfa. Now Fort Worth!
Stephenville, Texas has had multiple sightings of UFOs in recent weeks. All this flatland and big sky just makes us irresistable to the intersteller critters!
Stephenville rides wave of publicity after UFOs
Web Posted: 01/19/2008 12:10 AM CST
Lisa SandbergExpress-News
STEPHENVILLE — All hype aside, space aliens have not invaded the streets of this rodeo town southwest of Fort Worth — though nearly everyone here is keeping at least a playful eye out for them.
And maybe no one here has encountered any little green men in the week after dozens of residents reported seeing a strobe light-flashing object zipping through the night sky because they don't exist.
Sightings from around the country suggest extraterrestrial beings are actually gray, not green, says Dennis Balthaser, a UFO researcher and former investigator with the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, N.M.
"They're somewhat humanoid looking," Balthaser says of such accounts nationally. "They have a big head, a small-frame body, anywhere between three and five fingers, no hair ... no ears as such. A slit for the mouth."
But even if there's been no space invasion of Stephenville, the recent obsession with them has been out of this world in the town of 15,400 — and far beyond.
Ken Cherry, the Texas director of the Colorado-based Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, which describes itself as devoted to research on the topic, says the multiple sightings on the night of Jan. 8 could turn Stephenville into a mini-Roswell.
"Dozens of people are coming forward, responsible people, saying they saw something," Cherry said. "We're talking shop owners, ranch owners, oil field workers, just about every demographic imaginable."
Forget being the Cowboy Capital of the World. Folks in town are calling Stephenville the UFO Capital of the World.
Angela Joiner, the only full-time reporter at the Stephenville Empire-Tribune, can hardly put out a paper. Ever since breaking the story last week, she's been swamped with calls and e-mails from around the world — from people who either want to tell her about their UFO sightings or from international media types assigned to cover the story.
"I'm not accustomed to this. I don't do this!" Joiner, who's been on the job 18 months, said with a laugh.
Perhaps the only person who gets less work done these days is the local constable, LeeRoy Gaitan. He's in demand as the only elected official who can corroborate what dozens of others saw: something spooky in the sky over Erath County that evening.
He was on foot approaching his home when in the distance he saw a red glow, not as big as a hot air balloon but big. It didn't appear to be attached to anything. He watched it awhile before it burned itself out. Then it reappeared.
"I knew this wasn't right," he said. So he went inside to summon his family. His wife gave him this "get real" look, Gaitan said, but his young son came running.
Father and son saw what looked like really bright white strobe lights, nine or 10 of them. They flashed as the minutes passed. "All of a sudden, they shot off, they traveled northeast at a real high rate of speed," Gaitan said.
Though he doesn't believe it was a spaceship, he's had to answer calls from hundreds of people from around the country who do. His solution: "I've started screening my calls," he said.
Military officials have said they had no aircraft in the area at the time of the sightings.
And the military doesn't investigate UFO sightings. So that leaves Cherry's MUFON group. Five of its investigators will descend on the area today to begin interviewing witnesses.
It won't be a quick investigation, Cherry cautions. Interviews will be conducted one on one. And even after all the anecdotes have been gathered and sifted through — don't expect physical evidence — the researchers will hedge their bets.
"We could say we eliminated every other possibility. But we never say, 'This is alien technology' or 'This is a spacecraft,'" Cherry said.
For now, people around town are having a ball.
City Secretary Cindy Stafford wore a space alien mask to the City Council this week. It was fun, she said.
Because he hasn't done the research, Roswell's Balthaser isn't ready to make any educated guesses about what might have crossed the sky in Texas. But, if the lights were a mile long and half a mile across, as some have suggested, that would be the size of a "mother ship," which is much bigger than a flying saucer, he said.
Balthaser, a retired engineer with the Texas Department of Transportation, takes his research seriously and hates when other people don't.
He probably wouldn't appreciate the T-shirts produced by the high school science club here that proclaim: 'Erath County: The New Roswell' and depict a spaceship leaving earth and towing a dairy cow.
By Friday, the club had sold 400 of them.
lsandberg@express-news.net
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