I love it when projects seem to blossom. Late in 2005, we learned that a grant I wrote for the local museum in Van Horn was succesful and our historic photograph collection would be digitized and put online at the University of North Texas Libraries' Portal to Texas History.
Because we're so far away from population centers and relatively unknown, we have to do everything we can to create awareness that we're an interesting place to visit. So, I contacted the administrator of a great blog of historical photographs, www.shorpy.com and asked if he would post some from the Clark Hotel Museum collection at the Portal. He did, and in less than an hour, 60+ people had seen our photos. As I write this at 1:40 pm Sunday, one of the photos has had over 500 hits. Here's the Texas Mountain Trail page on Shorpy, and the comment stream about this photo. When they were originally posted on Shorpy on Friday, our photos were sandwiched between some of Dorothea Lange's....I got a real kick out of that.
When one commenter wondered what the R.P. Bean Ranch looked like today, I drove out there as close as I could without tresspassing (a huge no-no out here) and took some shots. Though I couldn't get to the 1910 vantage point atop an adjacent mountain, I could get close. When the sky clears up a little (we're experiencing some uncharacteristic haze) I'll get a better view of both mountains in the original.
I'm also trying to find ways to drive special interest traffic to various pages of our website, such as the Women's Memoir reading list/travel itinerary from our www.texasmountaintrail.com/read page which is posted on a great site, goodreads.com, see it here.
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