Like many Texans this summer, Morgan Page and Dustin Rice spent a recent morning packing up the car to head to a family beach vacation. But before they reached Rockport, they first planned to stop in La Grange, where they would roam and scout for photos and stories that spoke to them. Such detours are common for the couple, who spent almost three years traveling more than 10,000 miles across the state to photograph and explore the history of abandoned small communities, focusing mostly on pioneer towns. The result of this ambitious project is the hauntingly captivating “Bones of Texas,” a traveling exhibit of photos taken by the couple as well as short stories written by Rice—some of them true, some simply inspired by the images.
The exhibit, which started its run in Wichita Falls this spring, is on display through the end of August at the River Valley Pioneer Museum, in Canadian. It moves next to Vernon, where it will run from September 7 through October 23 at the Red River Valley Museum. Supporting small, local institutions was important to the couple. “When we’re driving around all these towns, we look for more regional museums,” says Page. “When we saw the River Valley Pioneer Museum—it’s such a great building in and of itself, let alone what’s inside—it inspired us even more to reach out to regional museums that serve the towns we actually go to and photograph.”
Page is an associate professor of graphic design at Midwestern State University, in Wichita Falls, while Rice, who earned a B.A. in English at Texas State, in San Marcos, and is a hobby photographer and artist, is an inventory manager at a railcar repair facility. The pair, who got engaged while working on the project, were heavily inspired by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Farm Security Administration photographers, including Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston, and Russell Lee, who moved to Austin in 1947 and remained there until his death in 1986. “I think the FSA photographers are really important to our project because they were asked to document the effects of poverty on rural communities,” says Page. “I often find that the abandoned towns that we visit and photograph were in their last days during the Great Depression. I like to think we’re picking up where they left off.” Adds Rice, “I love walking up on something that’s experiencing the end of its life cycle but is brand new to us. I dig back and find the history of it and the real stories as much as I can.” Here, the couple explain the stories behind some of their favorite shots from “Bones of Texas,” which they hope to turn into a book.
Some of the subjects in the “Bones of Texas” project appealed more to Rice than to Page, and vice versa. One place that spoke specifically to Rice was this abandoned gym in the Panhandle ghost town of Perico. “We were going about seventy miles per hour, and this place caught the corner of my eye, so we slammed on the brakes and turned around,” he recalls. “The way the sun hit it—it was the first one that I wanted to find a story to go with it.” Rice discovered that the great droughts of the thirties wiped out the town before this newly built gymnasium could ever be used. He writes: “During the Depression, it represented what the people hoped their community would become, like expensive shoes bought too big, allowing a child to grow into them.”
Dustin Rice/Bones of Texas
Page, who grew up in the planned community of the Woodlands, outside of Houston, is especially drawn to the Texas Panhandle. In this landscape, she is inspired by the FSA photographers of the Great Depression. “At some point while we were lost along U.S. 385, we came across this bridge near Boot Hill Cemetery,” Page says. “I couldn’t tell if it was unfinished or had just decayed.”
Morgan Page/Bones of Texas
Sometimes, the true stories of a place are even better than a writer could imagine. Such is the case with Boot Hill Cemetery, in Old Tascosa, where, as with other boot hill cemeteries across the Old West, you literally had to die with your boots on to be buried in a plot. Rice and Page delighted in the unusual names they found among the 27 markers, such as Ruben Juice and Apple Axe. Writes Rice: “We know they existed by the markers on their graves and one line that survived in Oldham County historical logs. … The notes say that Juice ‘up and died’ and Apple ‘went with him.’ That’s it.” Now a ghost town, Tascosa is about forty miles northwest of Amarillo, where Rice’s father grew up.
Morgan Page/Bones of Texas
Page and Rice were drawn to the Jack County town of Jermyn (population 75 as of 2010) on a road trip because of its intriguing name, which it turns out is in honor of J. Jermyn, the son of a Pennsylvania coal magnate. “Our Jermyn photo shoot was very unexpected,” says Page. “The name of the town sounded interesting; we made two lefts once we got to town, and this church appeared in front of us. The whole church is smothered in sunflowers from all sides. This photo was one of five photographs that Dustin took right out of the door of the car.”
Dustin Rice/Bones of Texas
Jermyn’s First Methodist Church was established in 1909 inside the first house built in town. The following year, members built this church, which became a Texas Historic Landmark in 1968. The Bible lying on the pulpit was there when they arrived. Says Page: “It’s like they picked up and left quickly; it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. There are kitchen tools left out and everything—it’s an eerie place. You know there was so much activity and life there for a long time.” The “Bones of Texas” exhibit also includes a photo of a hymnal page that the pair found lying on the ground nearby.
Morgan Page/Bones of Texas
Glenrio, a ghost town on the Texas–New Mexico state line, was high on the list of places that Rice wanted to explore when they first began their project. He took this photo of an abandoned gas station at sunrise, and later wrote the accompanying true story of bus driver John Hearon, who in 1956 saved the lives of his passengers. After his bus got stuck in a snowstorm en route to New Mexico from Amarillo, he walked fourteen miles through the blizzard to get help in Glenrio. “His story is one hundred percent real,” Rice says. “He almost died to help save complete strangers.”
Dustin Rice/Bones of Texas
The town of Medicine Mound, which was named for the camps and ceremonial sites of the Comanches and was devastated by the Great Depression as well as a large fire in 1932, “triggered something in both of us,” Page says. Although they found remains of a few buildings, including a schoolhouse and a general store (on which someone painted “Where Did All the People Go?”), the only signs of life they encountered were these horses outside of town. They didn’t see a single human.
Morgan Page/Bones of Texas
While walking around the courthouse square in Paducah, the small seat of Cottle County, just south of the Panhandle, Page was suddenly struck by the marquee on the long-shuttered Palace Theatre, which opened in 1928. “I saw ‘John Wayne’ and thought, wow, this town is still stuck in the era that it thrived, most likely,” says Page, who once worked at the historic River Oaks Theatre in Houston. “That marquee yelled at me to photograph it.”
Morgan Page/Bones of Texas
This wall of an abandoned building in the tiny town of Barstow, in Ward County, struck Page as a kind of color field painting, reminding her of her favorite painter, Mark Rothko. When Page and Rice get married this year, they will exchange vows at the Rothko Chapel, in Houston.
