Museum Building - Glen Rose, TX
N 32° 14.105 W 097° 45.377
14S E 617179 N 3567172
This innocuous-looking building at 101 NE Vernon St is now home to the Somervell County Museum, and while it may not look fancy, as a contributing building to the Glen Rose Downtown Historic District, interesting things have happened under its roof.
Waymark Code: WM123AC
Location: Texas, United States
Date Posted: 02/15/2020
Views: 3
A framed sign near the front door provides some history:
The tornado of 1902 that devastated Glen Rose destroyed the first building on this site, the Glen Rose Herald newspaper office.
The newspaper rebuilt and after its sold around 1910, this building housed the first indoor picture show in town. The silent movies were shown with a "magic lantern" that generated enough heat to have to be cooled with water. First picture show: "The Poisoning of The Flume."
Glen Rose's first Coca-Cola bottling plant moved into this building later. As time went by, the building had various purposes: skating rink, meat market, shoe repair shop, dwelling.
Then around 1970 the Somervell County Historical Society bought the property for a museum and the county's first public library. The library has gone on to larger quarters and the museum remains.
Dinosaur bones, teeth and tracks and fossils occupy a sizable portion of the exhibits. A large barbed wire collection, household items and farm tools, photographs and a moonshiner's still all add diversity to the exhibits.
[Jeanne Mac, Museum Director; Somervell County Historical Commission; Glen Rose-Somervell County Chamber of Commerce]
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The museum building, also known as the Gresham's Magic Lantern Building, is a contributing building to the Glen Rose Downtown Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places, and their Registration Form (see URL, below) provides some good reading, elaborating that the "movies" were actually picture shows:
The Gresham's Magic Lantern Building is a three-bay rectangular One-part Commercial Block originally with a flat roof that was expanded to serve new purposes into an L shape with different roof lines. It stands fronting on the courthouse square at the northeastern side of the intersection of Northeast Vernon Street with East Elm Street. The front measures 25 feet 4 inches across, while the building extends back 50 feet 10 inches. The three-bay front of the building has three tall double-door openings with four-part arched segmented semicircular transoms. The limestone masonry building is coated with stucco and currently is painted a light tan color with chocolate brown trim. The front originally had a wooden and sheet metal awning, as did almost all the other commercial buildings on the courthouse square. That awning was replaced with the current wooden awning with curved plywood trim and a covering of shake shingles that is supported on four juniper timber posts. The rear third of the original building has a raised shed roof and now-covered clerestory windows over an interior mezzanine area that begins to appear in photographs dated ca. 1945. At some date a low pitched roof with the gable running the length of the building was placed atop the original flat roof. The building at a later date was extended 40 feet to the northeast to create an L-shaped addition 28 feet deep. On the northeast and southeast sides of the L addition an awning-covered concrete-floored open-air porch was created. Another small rectangular addition was made on the rear to accommodate a toilet.
The Gresham's Magic Lantern Building stands at the site of an earlier limestone structure, the Glen Rose Herald Building, which was destroyed in the 28 April 1902 tornado. Following the storm Louis Sylvanus Gresham purchased the property with the ruins of the newspaper building and constructed the present building to become a theater for commercial screening of magic lantern shows, the equivalent of mid-twentieth-century slide shows. Other commercial ventures followed in the building, among them a mercantile store and a meat market. About 1914 George I. Daniels moved a Coca Cola bottling plant into the structure but then it relocated to another building on the square about 1920. The old Gresham's Magic Lantern Building, by the late 1920s being known as the J.I. Parham Building, housed a ladies' hairdresser and a shoe repair shop operated by members of the W.A. "Bill" Draper family, who lived in the back of the building. Other residential occupants followed, with two elderly sisters, Pearl and Joe Cole, living there into the late 1960s. At this time the Somervell County Historical Society organized, purchased the property, and in 1971 moved its museum into the historic Gresham's Magic Lantern Building, where the institution has served the public since that time.