It’s Not Big. It’s Large.

By Gerald E. McLeod

The Texas Panhandle is a big place, and it takes the largest history museum in the state to tell its story.

Like a time machine, the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon takes visitors on a fantastic journey through the evolution of the great Texas plains.

The museum is “the Smithsonian of Texas,” says executive director Guy C. Vanderpool. “Within these walls you can go from prehistoric crustaceans to 20th-Century art in a short walk.”

A visit through the galleries combines trekking along a timeline developed over thousands of years and rummaging through an attic of treasures. The museum connects the people of the plains to their tools and toys-starting with the dinosaurs and proceeding to the 19th Century, when barbed wire, the windmill, and the railroad conspired to change the landscape of what was then a sea of grass. Some believe that Spanish conquistadors called the vast, treeless prairie the Llano Estacado, or staked plains, because the only landmarks were the wooden stakes they used to mark their route and tether their horses. The story continues with the discovery of oil and gas deposits during the 1930s, and documents the accelerated changes of today’s world.

From the November 2007 issue.

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