MOONSHINE STILLS AND DINOSAUR FOOTPRINTS

Heritage travel enthusiasts love stumbling across the Somervell County Museum, located in a historic Glen Rose building that once housed offices for the local newspaper. In fact, the museum’s building was actually the second Glen Rose Herald headquarters constructed on the property. The first, along with much of the surrounding town, was scattered to the winds in a 1902 tornado. After the Herald sold the building in 1910, the handsome turn-of-the-century structure served as silent movie house. Its projector, a contraption called a “magic lantern” and precursor to the reel-to-reel projectors, required cooling with water due to the heat it generated while in operation. Over the course of the early 20th century the building also housed a Coca-Cola bottling plant, skating rink, and meat market.

The museum’s collection is of equal intrigue, highlighting a catalogue of early Glen Rose and Somervell County history. Stories from the Cretaceous Period to the recent past are told with eclectic items such as local dinosaur track castings, the pulpit of Elder and Glen Rose Pastor A. D. Wood, and a moonshiner’s still (owner’s name withheld to protect the “innocent”). A variety of archival photographs and documents portray early Glen Rose and Somervell County life in the late 19th and early 20th century, and the museum’s impressive collection of barbed-wire may be one of the most extensive selections of antique barbed-wire in the state. Look but don’t touch, however. The wires may be old but the barbs still pack a poke.