Bones Of Texas

A collection of photos and stories from out-of-the-way sites in Texas. Morgan Page and Dustin Rice love history, especially the history of ordinary people and places. What began as an early date--a road trip to Spanish Fort, a ghost town near Wichita Falls--grew into years of crisscrossing Texas in search of stories hidden in abandoned buildings, neglected cemeteries, and all-but-forgotten towns. Bones of Texas features nearly 100 color photographs and 28 compelling histories. The book opens at Medicine Mounds, a sacred site of the Comanche people, and moves through tales both notorious and obscure, with subjects ranging from Machine Gun Kelly's Texas hideout, to the "orphan train" of Galveston, to a high school gym where students once played a basketball game astride donkeys, to the grave of James "Double Jimmy" James, a 100-year-old watermelon farmer-turned-local legend. Each story, and every photo, is an act of preservation, allowing readers to encounter Texas history as a landscape of lives once lived, even as the physical markers continue to decay. Ultimately, the "bones" that Page and Rice encountered--often mysterious, always evocative--transcend time and place, and now endure in the pages of this unique book.