A People, A Place: The Story of Abilene Volume 2: The Modern City, 1940-2010 - Softcover

Sledge, Robert W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1933337451 ISBN 13: 9781933337456

Publisher: State House Press, 2011

Synopsis

In 1940, Abilene, Texas was just an overgrown country town of some 25,000 souls. World War II wrought a permanent change through the advent of a major army training camp housing 60,000 troops. Although the base closed at the end of the war, the city soon attracted an air force base that continued to leaven the community.Over the next seventy years, Abilene grew to be home to nearly 120,000 citizens. Population growth carried with it the need for geographic expansion, infrastructure upgrade, and economic diversification, but also unimaginable cultural change. While the retail operations of the city spread far beyond the bounds of the old business district, a historic preservation initiative changed the deteriorating downtown into a thriving and vibrant cultural center.

Robert W. Sledge picks up the story of Abilene where Volume 1: The Future Great City left off and takes readers through the history of the burgeoning country town as it became a modern city. He details Abilene as the central presence of a wide region known as "the Big County" and places it distinctly in the modern era.

About this title

About the Author:

 

ROBERT W. SLEDGE is Professor Emeritus of History, McMurry University, and historian-in-residence for the Grady McWhiney Research Foundation. He has written several pieces on the history of Abilene, a place he has called home for the past forty-five years.

 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Abilene was built by boosters, sustained by boosters, and still continues by boosterism (under a different name, of course). It’s a self-made town and is not reluctant to sing its own praises. Ronald Reagan, before his political years, came to Abilene and stayed at the home of oilman French Robertson. A.C. Greene, then a humble reporter for the local newspaper, was invited to meet the actor. The reporter recalled that Reagan put his arms around Robertson and Greene and said “‘Boys . . . we’re the best kind of Americans. We’re self-made men.’ . . . As I left them, he and French were still congratulating each other (and me in absentia, I trust) for being self-made men.” There’s the State School (now under a new euphemism), the District Court, Camp Barkeley, Dyess AFB, the CCC-built State Park, Lake Fort Phantom Dam, the West Texas Fair and Rodeo, numerous businesses and the colleges, all brought in from outside or invented locally. How did they get here? The answer: Abilene went out and recruited them.

            But we also had an inheritance. Downtown renewal came by the grace and grants of some generous citizens, most notably the Dodge Jones Foundation. The money and the ideas that this foundation poured into Abilene are absolutely reflected in the city’s downtown, where renovation and preservation of historic buildings on the one hand, and dedication to the arts on the other, makes the area visually pleasing and physically vibrant. Numerous indeed are the communities whose downtown areas feature shuttered businesses and deteriorating structures, scars on the façade of enterprise. Not so in downtown Abilene, where renewal is in the air. And most of it was generated from initiatives of the Dodge Jones Foundation. The money came from the railroad, land, and business empire of Col. Morgan Jones, the Welch entrepreneur who made his fortune in the New World and settled in Abilene as his main place of residence. His family shared in his ability to create wealth and then added an unparalleled element of public and private service. Abilene is not entirely “self-made” with generosity like theirs.

            What else is Abilene? Like most other places, it has poverty and wealth, virtue and crime, vision and blindness, compassion and hard-heartedness, good people and bad. But it has some other features that distinguish it from “most other places” in degree if not in kind.

 

About this edition

• Publisher: State House Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1933337451
• ISBN 13: 9781933337456
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 344