For more than half a century, Austin artist Don Collins crisscrossed Texas looking for traces of the past. Most often he has found them in a variety of old buildings. Drawings of these places, thirteen a year, appeared for three decades in popular calendars issued in Austin by the Miller Blueprint Company. The publications themselves have become collectors' items.In order to prepare his annual calendars, Don frequented less-traveled byways and often forgotten places. When he discovered that he had begun retracing his routes, he bought a stack of Texas county road maps. The artist marked the courses that he had taken so that he would be sure to see new country on each subsequent foray: ""I would seek out roads that followed the path of least resistance, often up a creek. I would follow them and usually find an old structure."" In time he expanded his geographical range to more distant areas of the state: ""I wanted to go there and see what it's like.""In this book, Collins has chosen seventy from more than three hundred works of art that he created for the Miller Blueprint calendars. The carefully detailed renderings record buildings from farmhouses to industrial plants, from shanties to mansions. Through these pages viewers tour the state both visually and through the artist's own recollections about the remarkable range of places he has recorded with pencil and paper.

These are fascinating stories of the memories of ex-slaves, fourteen of which have never been published before. Although many African Americans had relocated in Oklahoma after emancipation in1865, some of the interviewees had been slaves of Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, or Creeks in the Indian territory.

Before the development of the first self-governing windmill, settlement of the upland areas of the American West was almost impossible. Windmills were needed to pump underground water to the surface. As soon as their design and manufacture had been perfected, the mills became the most prominent feature of the American landscape, not only in the western two-thirds of the nation but also in the East and particularly in the Middle East. Besides supplying the needs of farmers and ranchers, windmills performed such tasks as pumping water to the roofs of New York tenements, cleaning our mine shafts and ships' bilges, and providing water for the boilers of locomotives.This guide to America's windmills is both a complete general history of turbine-wheel mills and an identification guide to the 112 most common models, which still dot the landscape today. With this guide a traveler or enthusiast crossing the plains and prairies of North American can identify virtually every farm-style windmill that he or she can see with a good pair of binoculars. The guide also serves as a handbook for the restoration of antique mills. In his lively narrative T. Lindsay Baker clearly explains the technical evolution of the mills and shares a wealth of windmill folklore. Among the 376 illustrations are unpublished historical photographs, long-lost engravings, field photographs by the author, and detailed India-ink drawings of the 112 most popular designs. Appendices identify all the known windmill manufacturers in the United States, Canada, and Mexico and all the known windmill models from the 1850s to the present day. The comprehensive bibliography is the first published list of source materials on the history of wind-power utilization.

In the spring of 1874 a handful of men and one woman set out for the Texas Panhandle to seek their fortunes in the great buffalo hunt. They intended to establish a trading post to serve the hunters, or "hide men, " and at a place called Adobe Walls they dug blocks from the sod and built their center of operations.

After only a few months, angry members of several Plains Indian tribes, whose survival depended on the rapidly shrinking bison herd, attacked the post. Initially defeated, the attacking Indians retreated. But the defenders also retreated, and intent on erasing all traces of the white man's presence, the Indians burned the deserted post. Nonetheless, tracings did remain, and in the ashes were buried minute details of the hide men's lives.

Adobe Walls tells us much about the dying of the Plains Indian culture and the march of white commerce across the frontier.

From its designation in 1926 to the rise of the interstates nearly sixty years later, Route 66 was, in John Steinbeck's words, America's Mother Road, carrying countless travelers the 2,400 miles between Chicago and Los Angeles. Whoever they were-adventurous motorists or Dustbowl migrants, troops on military transports or passengers on buses, vacationing families or a new breed of tourists-these travelers had to eat. The story of where they stopped and what they found, and of how these roadside offerings changed over time, reveals twentieth-century America on the move, transforming the nation's cuisine, culture, and landscape along the way. Author T. Lindsay Baker, a glutton for authenticity, drove the historic route-or at least the 85 percent that remains intact-in a four-cylinder 1930 Ford station wagon. Sparing us the dust and bumps, he takes us for a spin along Route 66, stopping to sample the fare at diners, supper clubs, and roadside stands and to describe how such venues came and went-even offering kitchen-tested recipes from historic eateries en route. Start-ups that became such American fast-food icons as McDonald's, Dairy Queen, Steak 'n Shake, and Taco Bell feature alongside mom-and-pop diners with flocks of chickens out back and sit-down restaurants with heirloom menus. Food-and-drink establishments from speakeasies to drive-ins share the right-of-way with other attractions, accommodations, and challenges, from the Whoopee Auto Coaster in Lyons, Illinois, to the piles of "chat" (mining waste) in the Tri-State District of Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma, to the perils of driving old automobiles over the Jericho Gap in the Texas Panhandle or Sitgreaves Pass in western Arizona. Describing options for the wealthy and the not-so-well-heeled, from hotel dining rooms to ice cream stands, Baker also notes the particular travails African Americans faced at every turn, traveling Route 66 across the decades of segregation, legal and illegal. So grab your hat and your wallet (you'll probably need cash) and come along for an enlightening trip down America's memory lane-a westward tour through the nation's heartland and history, with all the trimmings, via Route 66.

In the spring of 1874 a handful of men and one woman set out for the Texas Panhandle to seek their fortunes in the great buffalo hunt. They intended to establish a trading post to serve the hunters, or "hide men, " and at a place called Adobe Walls they dug blocks from the sod and built their center of operations.

After only a few months, angry members of several Plains Indian tribes, whose survival depended on the rapidly shrinking bison herd, attacked the post. Initially defeated, the attacking Indians retreated. But the defenders also retreated, and intent on erasing all traces of the white man's presence, the Indians burned the deserted post. Nonetheless, tracings did remain, and in the ashes were buried minute details of the hide men's lives.

Adobe Walls tells us much about the dying of the Plains Indian culture and the march of white commerce across the frontier.

There is something romantic yet harshly concrete about an abandoned town. Dreams, conflicts, and losses still haunt what remains, so it's no wonder we call these locales ""ghost towns."" A companion volume to his Ghost Towns of Texas, T. Lindsay Baker's More Ghost Towns of Texas provides readers with histories, maps, and detailed directions to the most interesting ghost towns in Texas not already covered in the first volume.The ninety-four towns described in this book range from American Indian sites abandoned prior to the arrival of Europeans to towns abandoned within the past decade. Baker's own recent photographs of the towns are complemented by historic photographs of more prosperous times. Many of these locations have never before appeared in any ghost town guide. Based on hundreds of miles of travel and fieldwork in abandoned towns all across Texas, More Ghost Towns of Texas lists sites throughout the state so that people from anywhere in the state can reach a ghost town in a day's trip.

"The indefatigable T. Lindsay Baker has now turned his enormous mental and physical energies to the subject and has brought to view - if not to life -eighty-six Texas ghost towns for the reader's pleasure. Baker lists three criteria for inclusion: tangible remains, public access, and statewide coverage. In each case Baker comments about the town's founding, its former significance, and the reasons for its decline. There are maps and instructions for reaching each site and numerous photographs showing the past and present status of each. The contemporary photos were taken, in most instances, by Baker himself, who proves as adept a photographer as he is researcher and writer....Baker has done his work thoroughly and well, within limits imposed by necessity. He obviously had fun in the process and it shows in his prose."---"New Mexico Historical Review"

By the time Route 66 received its official numerical designation in 1926, picture postcards had become popular travel souvenirs. At the time, these postcards with colorful images served as advertisements for roadside businesses. While cherished by collectors, these postcard depictions do not always reflect reality. They often present instead a view enhanced for promotional purposes. Portrait of Route 66 lets us see for the first time the actual photographs from which the postcards were made, and in describing how the production process worked, introduces us to an extraordinary archival collection, adding new history to this iconic road. The Curt Teich Postcard Archives, held at the Lake County Discovery Museum in Wauconda, Illinois, contains one of the nation's largest collections of Route 66 images, including thousands of job files for postcards produced by Curt Teich and Company of Chicago. T. Lindsay Baker combed these files to choose the best examples of postcards and their accompanying photographs not only to reflect well-known sites along the route but also to demonstrate the relationships between photographs and their resulting postcards. The photographs show the reality of the locations that customers sometimes wanted ""improved"" for aesthetic purposes in creating the postcards. Such alterations included removing utility poles or automobile traffic and rendering overcast skies partly cloudy. This book will interest historians of art and design as well as the worldwide audiences of Route 66 aficionados and postcard collectors. For its mining of an invaluable and little-known photographic archive and depiction of high-quality photographs that have not been seen before, Portrait of Route 66 will be irresistible to all who are interested in American history and culture.