DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, out here on the campus of West Texas State College, there sits a museum that didn't just grow — it outgrew itself, and then had the nerve to keep right on growing. This is the story of the Panhandle-Plains Museum.
Back in 1932, the State of Texas looked at twenty-five thousand dollars of private funds and said, we'll match that. Fifty thousand dollars total, and they put up the original unit. Not bad for a start.
But here's where it gets interesting. By 1935, the Works Progress Administration came into the picture, and through those projects, the museum started pulling in archeological and paleontological materials — bones, artifacts, the deep old stuff of this land — at a pace that the building flat-out could not keep up with. The collection was winning the race against the walls meant to hold it.
So what do you do when you've got more history than house? You go down. Another allocation of twenty-five thousand dollars was drawn up, and the architects Rittenberry and Carder got the commission to design a basement addition.
Ten thousand square feet of additional floor space, constructed and equipped, carved right out beneath the building like the answer had been underground the whole time. The Panhandle-Plains Historical Society has been the one running this operation all along — and when you think about what they're keeping here, all those layers of this land's story stacked up and still stacking, well, it seems like the most natural thing in the world that they had to dig deeper to hold it all.
What the marker says
In 1932 the State of Texas matched $25,000 of private funds to construct the original unit. Since 1935 the museum, through Works Progress Administration projects, has increased its archeological and paleontological materials beyond the facilities of the building. An allocation of $25,000 was used to construct and equip a basement addition designed by Rittenberry and Carder, Architects, to provide ten thousand square feet of additional floor space. The museum is located on the campus of the West Texas State College and is operated by the Panhandle-Plains Historical Society.