Building the Lone Star: An Illustrated Guide to Historic Sites by T. Lindsay Baker

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 699 Building the Lone Star: An Illustrated Guide to Historic Sites. By T. Lindsay Baker. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1986. Pp. xxii + 333; illustrations, appendix, index. $37.50. Building the Lone Star is a personal guide to the historic engineering works of Texas. T. Lindsay Baker, curator of agriculture and tech­ nology at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas, writes that he owes his interest in the subject to his father, a civil engineer, and numerous childhood excursions throughout the state. Out of more than a thousand sites he might have included, Baker has culled 103, explaining, “I have chosen to share the places that I like best” (p. xi). Baker discusses the history of each site in the space of three to four pages, then offers directions for finding it and suggestions for further reading. The sites are keyed to an outline map at the front of the book. An appendix listing selected historic engineering sites, with abbreviated descriptions, is intended as a starting point for additional research. The book is illustrated both with historical photographs and those taken by the author during a decade of travel and research for the History of Engineering Program (now the Center for the History of Engineering) at Texas Tech University. Baker’s choice of sites is wide-ranging, presenting a panorama of the state’s rich technological heritage. Especially interesting are Aus­ tin’s “moonlight” tower street-lighting system, which has illuminated the streets of Texas’s capital city since 1895; the Canon Ranch wind­ mill, the largest remaining operational wooden-wheel turbine wind­ mill in the United States; the Paris Abattoir, a municipally operated slaughterhouse opened in 1909 in an attempt to enforce sanitation laws; the beautiful Possum Kingdom stone arch bridge over the Brazos River near Graham, built by unemployed coal miners under the aus­ pices of the Works Progress Administration; and the San Antonio sewage system, one of the oldest wastewater treatment systems in the state, notable for its longtime use of broad irrigation to dispose of effluent and whose cypress-and-steel flumes, erected early in this cen­ tury by the San Antonio Irrigation Company, may still be seen today. The Harris County Domed Stadium (“Astrodome”), the world’s first large domed sports stadium, is the only post—World War II project included in the book. To his credit, the author almost always makes clear the meaning these engineering works had for the communities in which they were built, so that we come to understand the critical role technology played in subduing and populating what only a hundred years ago was wild frontier. Unfortunately, however, the sites are arranged alphabetically, making the book useful as a reference tool but less accessible to the general reader. A more serious consequence is that few connections or comparisons are made between similar structures; the broad pat­ terns of the state’s engineering history are often lost in the particulars 700 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE of each site’s history. It would have made more sense to group similar sites—bridges, lighthouses, hydropower, oil drilling and refining, and so on—and discuss them in the context of Texas’s history and development. Still another drawback is the inclusion of a number of engineering works that no longer exist or of which only remnants remain. An example is the Brazos Santiago Lighthouse, where only the piers of the lighthouse, supporting a modern harbor pilot’s office and radio station, survive today. But these are the only criticisms of what is overall a handsome, carefully produced, and welcome introduction to historic engineering works in the Lone Star State. Carol Poh Miller Ms. Miller is a historian and preservation consultant in Cleveland. She is the author of numerous articles in The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History recently published by In­ diana University Press. Manhattan 'Water-Bound,: Planning and Developing Manhattan’s Waterfront from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. By Ann L. Buttenwieser. New York: New York University Press, 1987. Pp. xxii + 243; illus­ trations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00. The title of this slender volume promises more than the book can deliver. Ann Buttenwieser...