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July 10, 2011
WOLF CREEK HERITAGE MUSEUM NOTES by Virginia Scott We are working on staying cool and our air conditioners are working overtime. Watering our flower beds is an never ending project. We hope all of you are fairing well. The grounds are doing as well as they can. Inside is wonderful so if you need to cool off come visit. The core team is coming to the end of their photograph project. The photographs are in new album boxes and are labeled so that we can locate the needed photographs by topic, town, etc. Next time you are in the area come by to view our collection. This project will protect our collection as well as allow us to research our county history more efficiently. Congratulations to the core team on a job well done. I wonder what they will come up with next . We are starting to investigate resources for grants to complete our building fund. If your company offers grants to non profits, please let us know. Our second quarter newsletter will be mailed this week. If you are not a member and want to receive our newsletter, contact us at 806-862-2123 to join. Information is also on our website. I am still trying to learn how to blog and twitter. If there is someone out there that would like to be the museum's blogger or twitter person , PLEASE CALL ME. Have a good week. HISTORICAL MUSINGS James Collinsworth fell or jumped off a boat in Galveston Bay and drowned on July 11, 1838. His death occurred less than two weeks after the announcement of his candidacy for President of Texas. His death was generally presumed to have been a suicide and his body lay in state in the capitol in Houston. In 1876 the legislature named Collingsworth County in his honor, though the act establishing the county misspelled his name. So don't spell check and correct the way I have spelled his name because it was the way he spelled it not the way we are used to seeing it spelled. Spell check likes it with the "g". Collinsworth was born in Tennessee in 1806. He served as a district attorney in Tennessee, where he was a political ally of Andrew Jackson and Sam Houston. He moved to Texas by 1835. He represented Brazoria at the Convention of 1836 and was a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. Collinsworth later served as Houston's aide-de-cam-p,in the Senate of the republic , and as the first chief justice of the republic. He also helped organize the Texas Railroad, Navigation and Banking Company and was a charter member of the Philosophical Society of Texas. At the time of his death he was running against Mirabeau B. Lamar and Peter W. Grayson for the presidency. This musing is from the Handbook of Texas Online articles by the Texas State Historical Association. |
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