Join us as we journey to Stephen F. Austin's colonial headquarters with Texas Historical Commission site manager for the San Felipe de Austin Historic Site, Bryan MCauley. Bryan takes us on a personal journey through his experiences and shares insights from his unique and informative perspective on the rich history of Texas and the importance of preserving our past. So, tune in to our latest episode to uncover Texas’s rich history, the role of public history in preserving it with Bryan McAuley.
Learn more about San Felipe de Austin Historic Site at https://www.thc.texas.gov/historic-sites/san-felipe-de-austin
Join us as we journey to Stephen F. Austin's colonial headquarters with Texas Historical Commission site manager for the San Felipe de Austin Historic Site, Bryan MCauley. Bryan takes us on a personal journey through his experiences and shares insights from his unique and informative perspective on the rich history of Texas and the importance of preserving our past. So, tune in to our latest episode to uncover Texas’s rich history, the role of public history in preserving it with Bryan McAuley.
Learn more about San Felipe de Austin Historic Site at https://www.thc.texas.gov/historic-sites/san-felipe-de-austin
This podcast is not sponsored by. It does not reflect the views of the institutions that employ us. It is solely our thoughts and ideas, based upon our professional training and study of the past ["The US's Media enjoying New Mexico and the cool air of this hot, hot summer.
Speaker 2:I'm actually myself in St Paul, minnesota, where it's a lot cooler than it is in Texas, but with me today is Brian McCauley, who is the Texas Historical Commission site manager for the San Felipe de Austin Historic Site, just outside of Houston. Brian, thanks for being on the show today. Now tell everybody what you do.
Speaker 1:We have a division called the Historic Sites Division that oversees public history projects and sites that are run by the agency, and I'm specifically assigned to the San Felipe de Austin State Historic Site, just outside of Katie, texas, on the west side and right next to Sealy on I-10. So we're along the state's busiest tourism corridor one of them, certainly and are privileged to be able to share the stories of Stephen F Austin and settlers who came to Mexican Texas before independence.
Speaker 2:Where are you from? Are you a native?
Speaker 1:Texan. I'm a native Texan and I grew up in the footprint of Austin's colony, as it were. So I went to high school in the county seat of Brasoria County and in Angleton, texas. So Brasoria and Fort Bend and Austin County, where I work today, are all really in the core of where people were settling when Austin was giving out land as part of Mexico. And I have a weird personal connection to Stephen F Austin anda, distant, distant cousin, closer to England than to Texas, as I joke with people. But we have a common ancestor and I grew up in a family that appreciated genealogical interest in history and I became a self-identified history nerd by about fourth grade, certainly by seventh grade. I was pretty hardcore and had a great seventh grade Texas history teacher, so I always had a history bug. I didn't perceive it as a career path, honestly, before I went to college. So, but yeah, I got a chance to see a lot of this up close and personal growing up and it's been a real privilege to serve at San Felipe for the last 15 years.
Speaker 2:Where'd you go to college?
Speaker 1:My undergraduate degree is from the University of Texas. I actually commuted to the University of Houston for a couple of years while I was figuring out what I wanted to be when I grew up, and then I transitioned to Austin and graduated with a BA in government and anthropology in 1991. I took a summer field school in Belize and did some archaeology mine archaeology to see if that was the career path for me, and pretty quickly learned I didn't like being hot and dirty and sweaty and traveling the country and not being with my family, so I chose not to pursue that path. Interestingly, I've pretty much always worked with historic sites that have significant archaeology, so it's been a fun resource. And then I did a graduate degree at Texas State in San Marcus, which is also in political science and the rest is history there.
Speaker 2:Well, so how did you transition from political science into working for the Texas Historical Commission?
Speaker 1:I know you had that archeology background, but yeah, so my first real job, as we think back on our lives and imagine how things have gotten us to any given point. I took a job with the state attorney's office in 1996. And honestly, gene, my background had prepared me primarily to do a lot of public speaking. As an academic, as a student, I'd done a lot of paper presentations and worked with committees and panels, and so I was able to convey my graduate degree in political science and that kind of on the ground speaking talent to work for the AG's office in constituent services. And I did that for about four years. So when I was living in Austin I got married there and then had both my kids and was working at the AG's office during that time. And then politics is always kind of a weird bedfellow for anybody, and it's certainly for non-elected politician. It can be a little strange. So I didn't have as much fun as I hoped I might being a talking head for politicians.
Speaker 1:I worked for both Dan Morales and for John Cornyn during the time that they were attorney's general, and then I decided to start looking for options as a state employee that might better suit my skillset but also my interest in public history and that kind of thing. So initially I looked at jobs with Parks and Wildlife, like a lot of people might, and was trying to find a fit there, and ironically, the Historical Commission in that moment, around 2000, was relaunching an initiative to promote the heritage trails that Governor Connolly had created in the 1960s as a way to get people into rural Texas to find history. And so I was hired on a grant. I was not an actual employee of the agency, but I was hired to manage a grant program related to redeveloping the Texas Independence Trail and I moved to Victoria where I happened to have some family. It was an interesting overlap because I was in Victoria while they were doing a lot of the LaSalle archaeology that was going on. Both the shipwreck had been finished, but they were doing work at the Fort St Louis site near Victoria and they had a public archaeology lab which I got a chance to visit and explore during my job there. So I did that, worked on the trail program for about a year and a half, and in that time I found that a lot of small town museums were interested in the work that I was doing and I got a chance to consider some other job opportunities and ultimately took a job with the Fort Benton County Museum as a marketing director and was smart enough to think that might open the door to future museum management, and so I started exploring how I could move into operating the museum from that post. The Fort Benton Museum also runs a site called the George Ranch Historical Park, and so I was involved primarily at the park and did get a chance to move into museum management and museum education and that sort of thing.
Speaker 1:And then just by happenstance, that institution was going through some changes and upheaval around 2007, which was the year that the legislature migrated the first batch of historic sites to the Historical Commission as part of the newly formed Historic Sites Division.
Speaker 1:So I was exploring options with people that I knew at the agency. I'd worked for the agency on the grant program, I'd been a client of the agency at the museum level, and so I started reaching out to see if there might be a home for me and was pleased. Initially they offered me two sites that had never been fully open to the public. One was the Leibar-Jurton Plantation in Bersoria County and then the other one was San Felipe, site which had never really been significantly developed. Parks and Wildlife here has a great state park, but the history part of the operation was always sort of run in partnership with other nonprofits, including a group that's now my friend's group, and so I was excited to be able to work on projects that were going to be changing and becoming new and exciting things. So I came to work for the agency in the spring of 2008 and have just celebrated a 15th anniversary with the agency.
Speaker 2:If I wanted to work for the Texas Historical Commission in getting involved in site management or many of the other projects that THC does. What advice?
Speaker 1:would you give me? So obviously, public history can be highly motivating for people who have that interest, particularly if you have an audience interest, and that's always where I came from. My fascination with museums had to do with how and why people come and what they're trying to explore and how you create memorable experiences. So that's a lot of what I had done in my previous two posts, but I think I'm an interesting case study for your question because, like you note, I don't have a traditional museum studies background or even a history background, although my political science focus always had an historical tinge to it, partly to serve my interest as a history nerd. My master's thesis was about the War of 1812, back in the good old days. So I always had that interest and I thought it was wonderful that San Felipe became my focus because it's got some really crazy political stories associated with the history of this town, and so I think my skill set and my ability to analyze some of those things serves well.
Speaker 1:So, for people looking for work, the agency has really had some success over the last decade in developing and managing state-of-store properties, so our division has certainly grown. We added some positions during this most recent legislative session. We've added sites that have come into the fold either through acquisition or people looking for a place to park a new historic site or transfer a handful from parks over the last few sessions. But I think there's some great opportunities and the good news for people looking at this as a potential career path is that almost all skill sets could be applied in some way.
Speaker 1:There's a number of things that we do that while they're classified as an educator or whatever, they're very adaptive to skills that people can bring if they have confidence and a record of success, particularly in program management, project management sort of stuff there's some real opportunity there. So I encourage anybody looking at historic sites as a prospective employee track. Our website posts a number of jobs. We've got a whole bunch up there today. I just had a staff meeting this morning in which my staff was commenting on the number of job postings our agency currently has out there. So if you know somebody looking to work in this field, then there's a great opportunity there.
Speaker 2:But I know that the THC does a lot of work in a lot of different areas, from historical markers that everybody's familiar with to site management, the historic trails program.
Speaker 1:Main Street Courthouse Preservation, all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 2:Now let's talk a little bit about San Felipe. The first time I went to San Felipe it was just kind of there was a log cabin store, there was a big, gigantic bronze monument of Stephen F Austin sitting, and that was about it, and I don't in fact the times that I'd been there I don't think there was anybody else there. Today that's all changed. It is thriving, and that's only one part of the site. So describe how what you can see if you go out to San Felipe. It's just four miles off Interstate 10. So what am I going to see as a visitor?
Speaker 1:So I appreciate that set up. Gina. We do think we've really changed the visitor experience in dynamic ways over the last decade or so. So, like you, I made my first visit here. I have a 90-plus year old grandfather who shares that Austin lineage, that connection that I mentioned, and he helped foster some of my history nerdness early on. And I'm pretty sure we came to the same Felipe site in the 1980s, maybe even late 1970s, as one of my first visits and it looked the same way to me when I was here the first time the replica cabin. And there was an historic building that, to your point, was operated as a museum for much of its time here. It was often only open on the weekends, it was volunteer run and if you were here on the wrong day you weren't going to have access to it. And then the Austin bronze that you mentioned. That's one of the 20 centennial statues that were commissioned as part of the state centennial planned in 1936. Like a lot of things, politicians and artists don't necessarily speak the same language. So most of those statues were not put in place for a year or two after the centennial because it took so much time to generate them. But the Austin statue was staged here in the fall of 1938. So it is an important part of our storyline and connection to that person, certainly, who had a profound impact on the story we tell.
Speaker 1:But starting in 2008, I came to work for the agency we weren't sure in the early years of exactly what form this site might take. What were we going to do? It's a state archaeological landmark and one of the challenges that listeners might not be aware of the town was deliberately burned, historically as part of the runway scrape. So one of the reasons so little was known about the town is it didn't have much of a physical presence. People had a rough idea of where things were. They put the statue in a place that's actually very close to the original downtown district, so they got that right, but there wasn't any resource here that you could see the story in when you came to visit. It was a very challenged thing. A good friend of mine and mentor who used to work for the agency, dan Utley, used to have me come speak to his graduate classes at Texas State and the whole premise for him was to put me out on stage and say tell him how you talk about a place where there's nothing left. Tell him how you interpret something like that. So I used to joke. Well, yeah, it's a challenge.
Speaker 1:But we also knew we'd be planning for an improved visitor experience and so we got really serious about the project around 2015, 2016, and started a fundraising campaign. The original intent was to spend about $12 million roughly half and half public and private funding and we had a lot of success in private fundraising. This is an exciting story for people. It connects to almost everybody that people know from the Texas Independence and Texas Revolution era and, of course, stephen F Austin really didn't have a dynamic home for his story, so that was an important part of it for us. But we broke ground in the fall of 2016. We then finished out our fundraising campaign. We had a little hiccup related to Hurricane Harvey and slowed down the private side a little bit, but we were able to juggle some private monies. Ultimately, the project ended about 70, 30 public private, but we got to the finish line and opened the facility here in the spring of 2018.
Speaker 1:So we've been open a little more than five years and, yes, we've seen a lot more visitors. We have a modern visitor center building with modern exhibits. We hear from a lot of guests. They clearly respond to the sort of our contemporary feel. They like the fact that a lot of museums in Texas, just by happenstance, by reality, have taken on a little bit of a dated look. All the big museums are going through redos right now and they're all going to get a fresh coat of paint and a new facelift in the next few years at the Alamo and San Jacinto and Washington, nebraska and all those popular sites. But we were privileged to get out ahead of that schedule and our visitors have really responded well.
Speaker 1:So to your point about how we interpret the site, the visitor center has a really compelling story. It uses some objects, it uses a little bit of media. We had some custom art designed to help stage some of the stories. And then the property, the facility sits right on the edge of what we think was part of the occupied town site. So our agency's motto of real places, real stories really plays out well here. We find visitors just enthralled that they can walk the grounds where someone like Stephen F Austin or William Travis or whoever was on the streets. And so we do some interpretation in the landscape of where buildings might have been and where stories were playing out.
Speaker 1:And in the coming couple of years I'm excited to announce we're going to be opening a public archaeology lab.
Speaker 1:So when I had that trails program back in 2000, so 23 years ago we did an assessment of the region where we went out with a team of experts multidisciplinary experts and we looked at properties that were part of the independent story and how to promote them, how to link them, and I remember vividly I walked the grounds here at San Felipe, over by the statue, with the lead archaeologist on the LaSalle project.
Speaker 1:At that time he was one of our experts, traveling with us for a couple of days. His name was Mike Davis and Mike pointed out to me that San Felipe was the next great public archaeology project. At some point the state's going to get excited about this place like they did about LaSalle Because it was burned and because of the people that were here. It was really going to be a compelling experience. So I'm excited that now we're on the verge of creating that public archaeology component for this site and that future visitors will be able to come in and explore our facilities, take a look at what we're analyzing, what's come out of ground recently, and get a sense of what we're thinking about and the questions we're trying to answer and what we're finding in response. It's a really compelling visitor experience, I think.
Speaker 2:You just can't get away from the archaeology.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a big deal here and it's something that we're doing pretty well right now. Obviously, texas celebrates Archaeology Month in October and that's a big part of our celebration. Many of the objects on display in our exhibit were archaeological recoveries and that's just a reality. People that had really cool Stephen F Austin associated stuff or objects associated with other town residents and visitors. Because we were so late to this public history party, those objects had all been given away, they were in collections and so I don't have the privilege of acquiring a lot of that stuff.
Speaker 1:I'm excited we're opening up a temporary exhibit in September, so next month that will celebrate mostly it's kind of themed around the bicentennial of the founding of the town, which happened in the fall of 1823.
Speaker 1:So, being an early site for independence and settlement, we get to start pushing this bicentennial story as we lead up to 2036. And we're going to be borrowing some really unique objects, documents and others from the General Land Office, who's a great partner of ours, from the State Library and Archives, from the State Preservation Board, from the Brisco Center at UT. We've got a lot of things on tap that'll be part of this year-long celebration and we're bookending it around two bicentennials that we're really excited about the founding of the town where Stephen F Austin and the Baron de Bastrop stand here on the bluff and say this is the place, this is where we're going to operate our headquarters, and then on the back end, next summer we'll be celebrating the initial issuance of deeds under the Mexican government to what history now knows of as the old 300. So that summer of 1824 is when many of them started getting their legal title to late. So we're going to have both of those bicentennials sort of encapsulated in this exhibit. It'll be a lot of fun for us.
Speaker 2:If you've not been out to the San Felipe site, you are really missing out on a great part of Texas history at a fantastic state of the art museum that is. I tell people when they say, well, where's the good museum, I say look, go out, see San Felipe. That is awesome and I've really got to congratulate you guys on such a top notch museum.
Speaker 1:It's a real privilege for me to have been on this project team for as long as I have been, and I didn't mention earlier there were a lot of sites. I grew up close to the Barnard-Hog plantation when I was a kid, in high school and things, and when I first approached the agency about the sites that were transferring, I remember somebody in Austin had the bright idea.
Speaker 1:Well, that's right there where you are, I'll put you at Barnard-Hog. Maybe that'd be a good option and I had the thought to say I've had a museum career at that point for almost a decade and what was motivating to me was being part of a team that was going to rethink a visitor experience somewhere. And while I love Barnard-Hog and it's a great site and it's going through some development the Leibach-Jurgen complex now that site was less appealing to me because it already existed. I really wanted to work at a site where we were going to be thinking through the issues of audience and what we could offer, and Samplein Bay is uniquely challenged. We were what I always tell people were object poor when we started planning for our exhibit and we had to think about how to tell stories in somewhat non-traditional ways. But I appreciate you being such a great champion of the site. I've enjoyed having you out here. I remember, jean, I tell the story sometimes A lot of times on weekends we do structured programming just sort of off the cuff, where we'll offer a theme tour or something, and I remember one day we had a staffing crisis and somebody couldn't make it in and somebody else had a problem.
Speaker 1:I ended up being here alone on Sunday and we had scheduled a program about the old 300. I don't remember exactly the topic, but I got a call from you at some point. You and your wife, I think, were coming back from the hill country and you said, hey, is that two o'clock program still going on? And I was thinking, yeah, come on in. And so I think I had to set you all up near the front desk so that I could run admissions, if anybody was coming in, but we had a great time with it.
Speaker 1:Our staff here really enjoyed the privilege of telling all the stories we get to tell, and I'll tell you on behalf of the visitor experience that we witnessed. This is a dynamic slam dunk for us interpretively, because most people that come here and find us now already love the story of independence. They're fascinated with all the players that were here during the Mexican era and the lead up to the Republic, and so the fact that we can connect our site to pretty much all the sites that they already know and love is great. And then we have some stories that surprise them. So many of my visitors, certainly Texans, don't really grasp that you have a war government here at San Felipe that flat out rejects an independence movement. They're trying to navigate the politics of Mexico and they're trying to figure out how to keep the team together. So they're really advocating for regime change. How do we get rid of this crazy Santa Ana guy and start back over with the Constitution we were all promised at the national level and make this work, and it doesn't last very long? That House of Cards is hard to keep balanced and I always joke. The provisional governor of the self-identified Mexican state of Texas that's now going to war with its mother country. Henry Smith, he couldn't order lunch with the guys on his legislative body. They hated each other. So they're here in town and they can't agree on anything. They're terribly dysfunctional.
Speaker 1:One of my other favorite stories that's recently emerged was when we were working on an exhibit. Installation related to it in the next year has to do with the Texas Navy. So the Republic of Texas Navy has gotten some real acclaim in recent years. A lot of descendant stakeholders, a lot of historians getting excited about it. And it's another one of those fun stories for us where, if I have a visitor come in and say I'm really interested in the Republic of Texas Navy, I get a chance to say to them how about this?
Speaker 1:The first ships were bought before there was a Republic. The government here is investing in a Navy without really even knowing that they're headed towards independence at that point. Then one of my favorite stories is you send these ships out into the Gulf of Mexico to start patrols and then all of a sudden the government at San Felipe folds and the move was made to Washington and the dependences declared. Well, there's no way to communicate with the naval officers. They're just out in the Gulf understanding orders trying to engage an enemy and they don't know what's happening from a government standpoint. But fun stuff.
Speaker 2:You've got an exhibit coming up next month, in September, based around a painting, a very famous painting, and I had no idea who painted it and no idea that it even had a title until you told me about it Painting everybody's scene, and that is.
Speaker 1:Well, the settlement of Austin's colony, yeah.
Speaker 1:So tell us about that exhibit yeah so this is the bicentennial thing that I alluded to a little bit earlier. So we're up for a year and we are partnering with the State Preservation Board. We're not gonna have the painting here and I appreciate you commenting on the text and seeing it. What I find interesting is the State Preservation Board curator and I were talking and she's super excited that we're gonna use a digital graphic related to the painting because she feels like not a lot of Texans are very familiar with the painting. So the original is at the Texas Capitol, it hangs there and I wanna say it's in the house chamber, but it's in one of the chambers at the Capitol.
Speaker 1:And Henry MacArthur was an Irish immigrant who really is a generation, almost two generations removed from this story, but he becomes famous in the latter part of the 19th century for painting these kind of epic battle scenes. He does one for San Jacinto and one for the Alamo, which are also owned by the state of Texas and very prominently displayed, and the one for Austin's Colony is set in 1824. And while it has some datedness and it has some representations that don't always pass muster in the current model, it's a fascinating study because everyone in the painting is based on a real person, with the exception of one character who is a scout of some kind reporting what looks to be an Indian raid on the frontier. But we're doing this exhibit about the bicentennial, where we're touching on founding the town, we're touching on early mapping and surveying, we're touching on how militias were formed, and a lot of that has to do with surveying, where indigenous peoples learned pretty quickly that when the guys were changed, showed up, that meant trouble, that someone's gonna try to build a town or do something, so that was a source of conflict. So we're touching on that interaction. And of course those early militias become the footprint of the ranging companies that today a lot of people associate with the Texas Rangers. So their bicentennial ties into that too. And then, as I mentioned, we'll conclude the exhibits themes with this whole idea of settlement who's coming and how did they get land? And so we'll be talking about the old 300 receiving the first land grants in the summer of 1824. So really fascinating thing. And MacArthur's painting touches every one of those stories.
Speaker 1:So one of the things I'm very pleased that the State Preservation Board is gonna allow us to do this with the image. A lot of times when you have an historic painting collections don't want you to jimmy with it much. They'll let you use it in exhibit but they don't want you to mess around with it and we've gotten permission to sort of gray scale out parts of the painting so that each of our sub themes we focus on the specific historical figures or the items that are depicted. It's a really fascinating painting If you look closely at it. There's all kinds of material culture objects that are there, including the surveyor who's depicted on the floor of the cabins again in Horatio Christmas, and he's drawing a surveyor's map, like a noted map, on the floor of this cabin in the moment that the painting is staged. So a lot of fun with the various moving parts and we're gonna use that painting to frame every part of the exhibit story. It'll really be a fun thing for us to celebrate. We're getting the exhibit ready to open in early September so that we're hosting a national conference of surveyors who have an interest in history and they're gonna be in Katie and Houston and we're gonna be a field trip destination. We'll come out here and we'll talk about early surveying and they'll be one of the first groups to see that exhibit. So super exciting.
Speaker 1:Henry McCartles a fascinating guy. The state library archives owns several of his notebooks that he kept information about the paintings he was creating. So he touches a lot of different state bases and the things that he's involved with and we're really excited to be able to use this painting in a way that captivates our story. It's set at San Felipe. I mean his notes about the painting say this is the land office cabin at San Felipe. That's what Stephen F Austin is depicted representing there, and he set the painting for 1824. So it's right in the window of the timeline and the story we're trying to tell.
Speaker 2:Well, that sounds exciting, and I can't wait to see it. Brian, we're about to run out of town and one thing we wanna ask everyone who's on the show is what do you know? So, brian Macaulay, what do you know?
Speaker 1:So I appreciated you giving me a little heads up on this question and the playful pivot you guys like to do with it, because I do think a lot of people in our field, where museums and public history were very collaborative, and so a lot of us don't invest a super ton of ego and, as our wives and friends would say, a lot of what we know is a bunch of useless information. We've dug deep in files and books and can spot all kinds of stuff that will make people's eyes roll back in their head, but I would tell you, from a public history standpoint, from the ways that we celebrate history, what I know in 20 plus years of working in this field is that, as business books will attest in other fields too, it's not about what you individually do. It's about how you find ways to empower your colleagues, your resources, to accomplish things that have an impact on people. So I find all of us hope that we write a book someday and we have some little claim to a corner of history that we're an expert in and can do whatever, and that's all great and maybe it'll happen and maybe it won't for most of us, but at the end of the day, what I know is that visitors are motivated when you can show them really cool and exciting stuff in a public history setting, and I can't carry enough water to serve all those visitors. So I, as a manager, have to be open-minded to the various ideas my staff and colleagues can bring to bear. The more we can put out there, inevitably, the better experience my visitors have, and we want to make this a place, to your point earlier, that Texans can come and be proud of and hopefully walk away going. Wow, I learned some really cool stuff I didn't know before and I've always imagined a lot of new stuff about Stephen F Austin, but I really didn't understand all the story and that kind of thing. So I think that's what I know. This is very much a collaborative experience and we feel like visitors contribute to that. We're a place where stakeholders who are genetically connected to some of our historical figures come here all the time, so almost a week goes by that I don't have someone come in and I'll share with you.
Speaker 1:We did a program recently with Ken Wise, who I mentioned earlier. He came out into a nighttime program with us and he's a big fan of a memoirist named Noah Smithwick who had written an account very late in his life that was often dismissed because he's 100 years old when he's dictating these memoirs and how accurate can he be? But he gets some things right and we enjoy that. And I was joking with Ken before we did the program.
Speaker 1:I had a visitor of all things from Western Canada, from Ontario, show up at my museum a couple of few months ago and she was asking me about a very obscure historical figure and a story and I'll admit she stumped the band. She knew stuff that I didn't know and we were kind of poking around on this. And then she told me it's a story from Smithwick. I said, ok, well, let's look at the source and chase this down. And it's the craziest thing.
Speaker 1:She had an ancestor who I want to say was in Kentucky, who decided he was going to we joked like the equivalent of flipping a house to make your money these days. He was going to flip a herd of mules. He was going to come down to Texas, get his hands on these mules and sell them in San Antonio and make his fame and fortune and he ends up being murdered and Smithwick ends up connected to it. So Smithwick goes to San Antonio, ends up buying or taking a horse and riding it back to San Felipe. And the guys here at San Felipe who would run the stable say, hey, we just sold that horse to a guy who's gone missing. And so there's this whole intrigue around it.
Speaker 1:And in this case I have this visitor walk in from Canada who had grown up in the Midwest Maybe she was in Ohio, I don't know long about that and she's telling me this story about her family trying to figure out what happened to her long deceased tangent ancestor who came to Texas and has mentioned in Smithwick's book. So we get those experiences all the time and I always tell visitors you're part of the collaborative team, you're helping us learn layers and nuance and things that we can share with future visitors. That's a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:But hey, Brian, I want to thank you so much for joining us here on Talking Texas History. Encourage people to go out and visit the site. It's a great site. We're closed on.
Speaker 1:Mondays, tuesdays Come see us any other day, 9 to 5. Our next big event we do a November event themed around Stephen F Austin, often called the Father of Texas Because of our bicentennial exhibit. This will be a fun November to come. It's the second Saturday in November and we do a free admission.