I was at the Texas General Land Office (GLO) to see if I could determine who owned the land upon which the tramway and terminal were built.
At a suggestion of another researcher I spoke to recently, I brought photos to show the archivists. That really fired them up and it generated some good conversation. One of the people I spoke to said her family had land in Brewster county; she told me that the park service "blew up" many of the old structures. People in the area started asking, "Yeah, whatever happened to X?" because "X" was no longer there. She said that when they confronted the NPS, they admitted to destroying structures, but didn't say why. Don't know when this occured.
Could the NPS have been involved in salvaging the tramway and terminal? I'm confident that it was salvaged for scrap metal because: 1) there are no rollers to be found that once supported the traction cable (there would have been one roller per side on a tower and pictures of the tramway in operation clearly show them), 2) the big, spoked wheels that powered the traction cable looks like their spokes were individually pulled, 3) there's no evidence of an engine at the cable terminal, and 4) the tramway had two cables (a traction cable and a track cable), but you only ever see one when hiking. The salvage operation is a mystery to me.
One of the librarians escorted me to the map room and introduced to me an archivist there. They were both interested in this project. Unfortunately, we couldn't locate the exact location of the tramway on the survey maps from 1904 and 1915 because they didn't have many physical attributes marked on them. I'll need to bring in a topo map with the tramway marked so that we can superimpose it over the survey maps to determine who most likely owned the land.
The archives did give me some interesting tidbits of information. Many of the blocks were given to railroad companies, like the Galveston and Houston Railway Company, but they were required to sell the land fairly quickly. Also, the land was divided up in a checkerboard pattern, where many of the "black" blocks were given to the railway companies and the "white" blocks were kept by the state. This also made it harder for the railway companies to become land speculators.
More to come when I return to the GLO with a map showing the location of the tramway...
Posted by Joelg at August 9, 2004 06:09 PM | TrackBack