A Fun and Educational Day Out

Saturday, June 5th, 2022, our daughter and son-in-law treated my wife and me to a trip to Fort Worth, Texas, to visit and tour the Texas Civil War Museum located in that city. If you, like me (like we), live within, say, a 150 mile or even a 200-mile radius of that fair Texas city, let me recommend, on behalf of myself, my wife, and my daughter and son-in-law aforementioned, that you also plan a day out to visit the museum. And take the kiddos along if you can. It will be well worth your time and expense.

We left early and arrived approx. thirty minutes after the museum opened for business (10:00am). During the time we spent touring the museum and its large collection of “Civil War” displays, perhaps fifty to sixty more persons showed up. With exception of one couple in particular (a man and an older woman presumably the man’s mother), virtually everyone else was there to pay his or her respects to the Confederate side of things. The man mentioned in the previous sentence was obviously a Yankee by simple virtue of his Yankee accent, coupled with the fact that he was loud and obnoxious in a place where everyone else knew instinctively or by good breeding that if (s)he felt the need to say anything aloud, to keep his/her voice low. I will say to his credit that the man in question seemed to have “gotten the message” and lowered his voice after having received for his trouble more than one disapproving look from other visitors, as well as a disapproving remark or two from the likes of yours truly.

While the museum pays a certain amount of tribute to the Yankee side of things in the WBTS, it is unabashedly friendly to the Confederate side, which of course it should be since Texans fought on the side of the Confederacy. In addition to its collection of Confederate (south wall) and Yankee (north wall) uniforms, arms, flags, field pieces, etc., the museum houses a small theater in which a thirty-minute-long film documenting the role of Texas and of Texans in the WBTS, as well as a segment showing the several Texas counties many Southerners (including some of my own people) emigrated to during the “Reconstruction” years.

There is a well-supplied “gift shop” housed in the museum as well, and the pricing of the items contained therein is surprisingly low. One “oddity” I noted about the gift shop was that the only “Civil War” movies they had for sale on their movie rack were Gods and Generals, Gettysburg, and Glory. I personally have those three and many more in my own collection at home. But the biggest surprise was that they didn’t sell the film I mentioned above that plays back-to-back-to-back all day long in their theater. I could be wrong about that; it could have been that they were simply sold out of it, but I failed to ask before we left. Anyway, I would have liked to have added the film to my collection because it is both interesting and informative; I learned a few things from having watched it that I did not know before.

On the way home, we took a slight detour in Denton Co. to visit the graves of several of my forbears, one of whom was among those Southrons mentioned above who emigrated with her entire family of origin to Texas during the “Reconstruction” years. Since almost all of the information on her Texas Death Certificate is incorrect, including her maiden name, it took me almost three years to find her, so I have been wanting to visit her gravesite for months and our son-in-law graciously obliged. But I digress.

In addition to the photo heading this little write-up and the one of General Lee’s statue, here are a few photos (a “photo montage” of sorts) that either I or my daughter took with our cell phone cameras inside and out of the museum: