Glen Rose, Texas

Glen Rose, Texas
Author: Gene Fowler
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 132
Release: 2002-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780738519425

Charles Barnard, a Connecticut entrepreneur, settled in the Brazos Valley in 1849, running an Indian Trading Post. He built a gristmill in 1860 near the confluence of the Brazos and Paluxy Rivers, around which the town of Glen Rose sprang up. Captured here in over 200 vintage photographs and postcards is the history of this quintessential little Texas town, from its origins as a mill town, to the bedroom community of Fort Worth that it has become today. In its earliest days, settlers flocked to the region from the war-torn South during the Civil War. By the 1900s, both Somervell County and Glen Rose established fame as a tourist resort, offering springs and artesian waters to heal the body and spirit. Naturopathic and magnetic healers built sanitariums, while locals built tourist parks to entertain the crowds that came for rest and relaxation. Showcased here are images of the Hill postcard collection, which relay the intriguing story of Glen Rose as a recreation mecca, the Moonshine Capital of Texas during Prohibition, the discovery of the infamous dinosaur tracks, and its development as it enters the 21st century.

Glen Rose Moonshine Raid, The

Glen Rose Moonshine Raid, The
Author: Martin Brown
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 112
Release: 2017
Genre: History
ISBN: 1625859457

With hills studded with whiskey stills and cisterns brimming over with beer, Glen Rose operated in concerted defiance of one of Prohibition's chief champions, Governor Pat Neff. In 1923, Neff dispatched Texas Rangers and undercover agents to do the job of the unwilling local law enforcement. More than fifty men were arrested, including the sheriff and the county prosecutor. Outraged, the town's most prominent citizens stalked the Rangers and their agents, assassinating the primary operative in an ambush and further escalating the affair. Author Martin Brown follows the frenzy of the raid and its aftermath.

Dinosaur Highway

Dinosaur Highway
Author: Laurie E. Jasinski
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0875654738

Where the Paluxy River now winds through the North Texas Hill Country, the great lizards of prehistory once roamed, leaving their impressive footprints deep in the limy sludge of what would become the earth’s Cretaceous layer. It wouldn’t be until a summer day in1909, however, when young George Adams went splashing along the creekbed, that chance and shifting sediments would reveal these stony traces of an ancient past. Young Adams’s first discovery of dinosaur tracks in the Paluxy River Valley, near the small community of Glen Rose, Texas, came more than one hundred million years after the reign of the dinosaurs. During this prehistoric era, herds of lumbering “sauropods” and tri-toed, carnivorous “theropods” made their way along what was then an ancient “dinosaur highway.” Today, their long-ago footsteps are immortalized in the limestone of the riverbed, arousing the curiosity of picnickers and paleontologists alike. Indeed, nearly a century after their first discovery, the “stony oddities” of Somervell County continue to draw Saturday-afternoon tourists, renowned scholars, and dinosaur enthusiasts from across the nation and around the globe. In her careful, and colorful, history of Dinosaur Valley State Park, Jasinski deftly interweaves millennia of geological time with local legend, old photographs, and quirky anecdotes of the people who have called the valley home. Beginning with the valley’s “first visitors”—the dinosaurs—Jasinski traces the area’s history through to the decades of the twentieth century, when new track sites continued to be discovered, and visitors and locals continued to leave their own material imprint upon the changing landscape. The book reaches its culmination in the account of the hard-won battle fought by Somervell residents and officials during the latter decades of the century to secure Dinosaur Valley’s preservation as a state park.

The Yellow Rose of Texas

The Yellow Rose of Texas
Author: Lora-Marie Bernard
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2020-01-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1439668833

A journalist searches for the truth behind the traditional folk song, and a free black woman’s role in the Texas Revolution. The legend of the Yellow Rose of Texas holds an indisputable place in Lone Star culture, tethered to a familiar song that has served as a Civil War marching tune, a pop chart staple, and a halftime anthem. Almost two centuries of Texas mythmaking successfully muddled fact with fable in song, and the true story of Emily D. West remains mired in dispute and unrecognizable beneath the tales that grew up around it. The complete truth may never be recovered, but in this book Lora-Marie Bernard seeks an honest account honoring the grit and determination that brought a free black woman from the abolitionist riots of Connecticut to the thick of a bloody Texas revolution. A Lone Star native who grew up immersed in the Yellow Rose legend, Bernard also traces other stories that legend has obscured, including the connection between Emily D. West and plans for a free black colony in Texas. Includes illustrations

Life Traces of the Georgia Coast

Life Traces of the Georgia Coast
Author: Anthony J. Martin
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 715
Release: 2013
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0253006023

Have you ever wondered what left behind those prints and tracks on the seashore, or what made those marks or dug those holes in the dunes? Life Traces of the Georgia Coast is an up-close look at these traces of life and the animals and plants that made them. It tells about how the tracemakers lived and how they interacted with their environments. This is a book about ichnology (the study of such traces) and a wonderful way to learn about the behavior of organisms, living and long extinct. Life Traces presents an overview of the traces left by modern animals and plants in this biologically rich region; shows how life traces relate to the environments, natural history, and behaviors of their tracemakers; and applies that knowledge toward a better understanding of the fossilized traces that ancient life left in the geologic record. Augmented by illustrations of traces made by both ancient and modern organisms, the book shows how ancient trace fossils directly relate to modern traces and tracemakers, among them, insects, grasses, crabs, shorebirds, alligators, and sea turtles. The result is an aesthetically appealing and scientifically grounded book that will serve as source both for scientists and for anyone interested in the natural history of the Georgia coast.

Goodbye to a River

Goodbye to a River
Author: John Graves
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2010-11-10
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 0307773353

In the 1950s, a series of dams was proposed along the Brazos River in north-central Texas. For John Graves, this project meant that if the stream’s regimen was thus changed, the beautiful and sometimes brutal surrounding countryside would also change, as would the lives of the people whose rugged ancestors had eked out an existence there. Graves therefore decided to visit that stretch of the river, which he had known intimately as a youth. Goodbye to a River is his account of that farewell canoe voyage. As he braves rapids and fatigue and the fickle autumn weather, he muses upon old blood feuds of the region and violent skirmishes with native tribes, and retells wild stories of courage and cowardice and deceit that shaped both the river’s people and the land during frontier times and later. Nearly half a century after its initial publication, Goodbye to a River is a true American classic, a vivid narrative about an exciting journey and a powerful tribute to a vanishing way of life and its ever-changing natural environment.

From a Limestone Ledge

From a Limestone Ledge
Author: John Graves
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2016-02-09
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1477309624

“Another fine, reflective, anecdotal look at rural Texas.” —New Yorker “Graves writes eloquently about a countryman’s concerns. There's not a false note in the book.” —Boston Globe “Like the unmortared stone fences of Graves’s native hill country, From a Limestone Ledge is constructed of bits and pieces never designed to fit together, yet made to achieve a unity that is more enduring than the sum of its individual parts by the hands of a master craftsman.” —Southwestern Historical Quarterly “The beauty of his work endures, and there is a greater pride in Texans’ hearts for their home, I think, than there would be if he hadn’t written the books he did.” —Rick Bass, Garden & Gun “In describing the particulars of his surroundings, Graves often was describing the world in microcosm and the place and plight of humankind in it.” —Bryan Woolley, Dallas Morning News

Springs of Texas

Springs of Texas
Author: Gunnar M. Brune
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Total Pages: 616
Release: 2002
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781585441969

This text explores the natural history of Texas and more than 2900 springs in 183 Texas counties. It also includes an in-depth discussion of the general characteristics of springs - their physical and prehistoric settings, their historical significance, and their associated flora and fauna.

Bones for Barnum Brown

Bones for Barnum Brown
Author: Roland T. Bird
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Total Pages: 539
Release: 2013-05-31
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0875655165

Roland Thaxter Bird, universally and affectionately known to friends and associates as R. T., achieved a kind of Horatio Alger success in the scientific world of dinosaur studies. Forced to drop out of school at a young age by ill health, he was a cowboy who traveled from job to job by motorcycle until he met Barnum Brown, Curator of Vertebrae Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and a leader in the study of dinosaurs. Beginning in 1934, Bird spent many years as an employee of the museum and as Brown's right-hand man in the field. His chart of the Howe Quarry in Wyoming, a massive sauropod boneyard, is one of the most complex paleontological charts ever produced and a work of art in its own right. His crowning achievement was the discovery, collection, and interpretation of gigantic Cretaceous dinosaur trackways along the Paluxy River near Glen Rose and at Bandera, Texas. A trackway from Glen Rose is on exhibit at the American Museum and at the Texas Memorial Museum in Austin. His interpretation of these trackways demonstrated that a large carnosaur had pursued and attacked a sauropod, that sauropods migrated in herds, and that, contrary to then-current belief, sauropods were able to support their own weight out of deep water. These behavioral interpretations anticipated later dinosaur studies by at least two decades. From his first meeting with Barnum Brown to his discoveries at Glen Rose and Bandera, this very human account tells the story of Bird's remarkable work on dinosaurs. In a vibrantly descriptive style, Bird recorded both the intensity and excitement of field work and the careful and painstaking detail of laboratory reconstruction. His memoir presents a vivid picture of camp life with Brown and the inner workings of the famous American Museum of Natural History, and it offers a new and humanizing account of Brown himself, one of the giants of his field. Bird's memoir has been supplemented with a clear and concise introduction to the field of dinosaur study and with generous illustrations which delineate the various types of dinosaurs.

This Man Called... Bull

This Man Called... Bull
Author: Dr. Jeffery J. Pruitt
Publisher: Crosshouse Publishing
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2011-04-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781613150023

Epic hero, relentless anomaly . . . Ernest T. "Bull" Adams was the first-ever Rhodes Scholar from Baylor University, but he spent most of his adult years on his knees sifting through the dirt as he unearthed clues about the earliest humans. He was a formidably brilliant lawyer and apt public official, yet he tenderheartedly devoted much of his professional career to representing the down-and-out. Blessed with Herculean physical prowess that earned him his nickname, this gentle giant was most at home while he entranced youngsters from his hometown in Glen Rose, TX, with yarns about his rugged, enigmatic life. A highly contagious illness during young manhood relegated Bull to rambling throughout the Southwest, thus spending lonely years away from loved ones, yet none was more esteemed than this oft-unkempt, unconventional legend who left behind a vast legacy of knowledge through his passion for the ancients. Dr. Jeffery J. Pruitt, whose family along with the rampaging "Bull" shared Central Texas roots near the Paluxy River, artfully unravels the life of this complex creature, whose genius continues to influence others even today. Dr. Pruitt authentically describes this "Bullish" hero who never knew the word quit and who dared to be a different spirit.