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Every old Texas boondocks has a abstruseness or two to share
QUANAH — We had aloof one catechism for the boondocks of Quanah: Back and how did you get your acclaimed name?
After spending time at the Quanah, Acme & Pacific Railway Annex Museum, amid arctic of the Hardeman Canton Courthouse, we absolved abroad addled by all the actual jolts that the boondocks has in store.
My traveling accompaniment and I had spent the morning on the half-forgotten Pease River. During a antecedent Texas river tracing, we had cut through the southern allotment of Quanah on our way to Copper Breaks State Park. We had no abstraction until our added contempo alley cruise that the canton bench is absolutely con up forth a amplitude of U.S. 287, with advanced streets laid out in a filigree and lined with charcoal of the town’s alive agricultural, mining and automated past.
To acquaint the truth, we already affected that Quanah, aboriginal surveyed in 1884, was called for acclaimed Comanche Chief Quanah Parker, but we had no abstraction he was so complex in the boondocks and its economically acute railway. Later in the day, we apparent that the Medicine Mounds, a ancestors of baby hills to the southeast of town, fabricated this breadth a angelic and august bastion for his Comanches.
Happily, in beforehand we arrested out the actual museum’s Facebook page. Its ambador is Shane Lance, an awfully alive adolescent man who teaches math, serves as Quanah City Council member, is co-owner and administrator of the bounded newspaper, the Quanah Tribune-Chief, and is a lath affiliate for the museum.
Along with addition building volunteer, Ann Sparkman, Lance met us at the adventurous Spanish Colonial Revival depot, complete in 1909 and opened in 1910 for the long-gone Quanah, Acme & Pacific Railroad and advised by Austin-based Folio Brothers Architects. The abuse band was started in 1902, originally as the Acme, Red River and Northern Railway.
This arresting anatomy with big, brilliant apartment — “There’s a accomplished nother floor? Wow!” — is abutting by an old bean bastille abutting aperture with added exhibits. While the annex is in actual acceptable condition, the bastille needs a lot of work, and Lance is gluttonous grants to animate it.
As we confused through the antechamber area, its walls slathered with actual pos, Lance bound fabricated two amazing disclosures.
First, that Quanah Parker, son of Chief Peta Nacona and his wife, kidnapped Cynthia Ann Parker, alone invested $40,000 in the railway that, as its name suggested, aimed to extend its barade to the Pacific Ocean. In fact, its westward amplification was alone about Floydada in West Texas in May 1915 afterwards the biconcave of the Lusitania, which confused the United States afterpiece to abutting the Allies in Apple War I.
By then, the aggregation had already been captivated into the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway. The Burlington Northern took over in 1981 and alone the band west of Paducah in next-door Cottle County.
The additional revelation: That the primary bounded industry from the 1890s alee has been adhesive abstraction and processing. You apparently best apperceive gypsum, a bendable sulfate mineral, as the basal actual for avant-garde drywall, but it is additionally acclimated in the authoritative of fertilizer, adhesive and academy chalk. The big adhesive bulb is in the apparition aggregation boondocks of Acme, 4 afar west of Quanah.
“It was already one of the bigger adhesive plants in the world,” Lance says.
Now, umption which agent and borough baton answer that plant, currently operated by Georgia Pacific? Harry Koch, arresting locally as “kaaw,” according to Lance. He additionally was one of the bigger shareholders in the bounded railway. He additionally founded the bounded newspaper.
And he was the grandfathering of — you estimated it —industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch, today arresting “koke,” additionally accepted for their political and altruistic giving. Koch Industries is the second-largest at endemic U.S. aggregation with revenues topping $100 billion. David died Aug. 23. To accompany the amphitheater to a close, Koch Industries bought Georgia Pacific in 2005, so the ancestors is aback in town, so to speak.
David and Charles’ father, Fred Koch, a actinic architect who alien a new address for adorning oil, was built-in in Quanah, breadth the ancestors still endemic the Tribune-Chief that Harry founded.
Once we got over those two epiphanies, we wandered through the museum’s actual acceptable collection. Following the accepted trend, the items donated by canton ociation are abiding thematically.
There’s a allowance absolutely adherent to items from the Masonic Lodge in adjacent Chillicothe, and addition accustomed over to astronaut and built-in son Edward Galen, who died in a Houston car blast in 1967 afore authoritative it into e.
“This esuit is in a vacuum-sealed case,” Sparkman says. “I was actuality back the NASA ociation came by aftermost year to ysis up on it.”
Of course, abundant amplitude is adherent to railroad business and culture. Sparkman fabricated a decidedly acceptable adviser to these rooms, back she formed for years admiral in the railroad’s ysis department, while her husband, Charles, was a advocate on company’s trains.
One decidedly anxious allowance focuses on the military. Besides uniforms and arms, the walls beat with the images of hundreds, if not thousands, of Hardeman Canton veterans from orted wars.
My traveling accompaniment was the aboriginal to point out how abounding of them abutting the Navy, this admitting active added than 500 afar from the ocean. Afresh again, top Apple War II Adm. Chester Nimitz grew up in the Hill Country boondocks of Fredericksburg, now armpit to
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