Bones of Texas: Photos and Stories from Bygone Places

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. Read more