Junior Historians Document Big Bend History

For years before she retired, Lee Bennett of Marfa was one of the most active Junior Historian sponsors in the state, and she sent many students on their way to college and life with a better appreciation of history as well as what it takes to research and write it. Big Bend Sentinel writer Sterry Butcher recently noted Lee's contributions to Big Bend area students as well as to the history of the region that they helped preserve:

Little known stories and photographs that make up an amazing history of Shafter, Redford, Candelaria, Marfa, and Presidio are sitting in five filing cabinets in a side room of the Marfa Public Library. The cabinets contain an almost inconceivable treasure: nearly 7,000 photographs cram the files with more than 24,000 pieces of paper documenting the stories of many of them.

This compilation is the result of thirteen years of work by the Junior Historians, juniors and seniors at Marfa High School, whose final projects under history teacher Lee Bennett were detailed research papers that each year sent the kids to their grandparents, great grandparents and other folks in the community in search of their story-the story of the family, photos, recipes, and remedies of the Big Bend area.

The contents of the cabinets may well form the most comprehensive picture of life in Presidio County that we will ever have, and the papers cover an astonishing array of topics from all over the Big Bend. The students heard nearly every story, recipe, or bit of how-to advice first hand, from the people who lived it: how to build an adobe house, a recipe for bison caldillo, the uses of candelilla wax, how to make lye soap. There's a cure here for hydrophobia, which entails ingesting the liver of an albino deer. There are startling tales of banditos and gun raids. Read through a few of the papers that talk about farming or mining or raising kids and you're struck with how hard it all must have been, fifty and seventy-five and one hundred years ago.

The rich history of Hispanics in the area is particularly well covered, stories that you won't find anyplace else. One student interviewed her great grandmother, who lived with a band of Mescalero Apaches after being kidnapped as a little girl. Another documented her grandmother's story of Pancho Villa's chilling, murderous visit to Shafter. Settlements and crossroads like El Borracho, Adobes, and El Indio crop up, long ago places where few, if any, people live now.

The papers were written and photos gathered between 1966 and 1979, and many of them became prize-winning projects at the TSHA's annual Junior Historian meeting. "Most of the people the kids talked to are dead," Lee Bennett reflected as she sifted through some of the collection. "The information is here because the kids got good at asking questions, and people were wonderful about coming forward."

Bennett used the assignment not only to gather information, but also to help the students build their confidence and pride. "I remember early on, one girl, very shy, very quiet, came to me and asked 'you want me to find out about my family?'" Bennett recalled. "She said they were just farmers in Candelaria, but she came back after her paper was done and told me that it was the first time she understood that her grandparents were real people."

As the word of the Junior Historians' project got around over the years, Bennett said that some people came to her and volunteered their own material and photographs, including stunning panoramic landscapes done by Marfa photographer Frank Duncan.

Library patrons now have access to the files with the help of a librarian. Hoping to make the materials more accessible, two Alpine grant writers have undertaken a multi-year project to put everything in a searchable data base and available for view on CD-ROM. "We index each drawer in each cabinet," said grant writer and cataloguer Betty Dillard. "We're finding far more photos than are listed in card files," she continued. "Betty and I are historians," said fellow grant writer and cataloguer Karen Green, and "This is a one of a kind collection of history you'll never find anywhere else, with original photos of family history, original places, towns that no longer exist."

Perhaps the most unexpected find for Dillard and Green has been three large bound books from the early twentieth century that a Dr. White of Shafter used to preserve the hundreds of photographs that he took of people of the area, from about 1910 to the mid-1920s. The doctor hung a curtain on the wall of an outbuilding as backdrop for the portraits, and he must have owned a little white terrier dog, because it appears in so many of the photos.

The Shafter portraits show dozens of weddings, poignant portraits of dead infants prepared for burial, lots of young vaqueros decked out in rakishly tilted hats, sisters sitting primly. There are not many photos other than wedding shots that show women and men together, and people tend to have the same solemn expression. Most appear wealthy enough to own lace-up shoes, and nearly all of them are Hispanic.

Who are these people? What did they think about? Where are their relatives? Bennett says that she has thought a lot about the contents of the collection that was cultivated under her direction, which she eventually donated to the library. She seems to have thought about the Shafter pictures in particular, and the fact that the names of only a fraction of the people in them are known. "They might not have been the richest or the most educated, but their lives are here in these books," Bennett said. "Are they not every bit as important as the rest of us?"

From the Big Bend Sentinel, April 4, 2002