Traveling Exhibit: El Camino Real de los Tejas – Its History, Peoples, and Places
By: Elaine Sullivan
I have been working with El Camino Real de los Tejas Trail Association for a little over six months. I attended Abilene Christian University for my bachelor’s degree, and recently received my Master’s in Preservation Studies with a focus in Museum Studies at Boston University. After moving back home to Texas from Massachusetts, I was excited to start preservation work in my home state!
The past few months I have been working on a traveling exhibit for the Camino. The topics of the exhibit are cattle drives from Spanish Colonial ranchos that aided in the American Revolution, settlement patterns along the trail, and where you can see and experience modern traces of the Camino. My hope is that the research and content I present for the exhibit will help explain connections between the many people and places of Texas that have existed for centuries! The exhibit is called El Camino Real de los Tejas – Its History, Peoples, and Places, and will hopefully do a great deal to raise awareness of a part of Texas history that is not as familiar to people. Taken as a whole, the themes in the exhibit will allow for a deeper and richer understanding of Texas and the reason that El Camino Real de los Tejas has been deemed as nationally significant!
We are planning on the exhibit being ready to go by Summer 2019! Long term, it is our hope that the exhibit will help to raise awareness about the importance of the trail, and encourage citizens to join us in preserving a piece of irreplaceable history on the landscape. In doing so, we can make sure that the road that led to the founding of Texas is not forgotten!
