Museums on college campuses are a resource for enrolled students, but they let the rest of us continue our education too—often for free. Many focus on a specific region or era of history, magnifying details that might get overlooked in a more comprehensive museum. And university gardens function as teaching laboratories for horticulture students, as well as soul-soothing spots to escape the academic grind.
While Texas universities are home to three presidential libraries and numerous art galleries, they also host a slew of small but excellent museums and gardens. If you’re touring campuses with your teenager this fall—or you just need some food for thought—check out these eight museums and two stunning university gardens.
Centennial Museum and Chihuahuan Desert Gardens
El Paso
Must-see: a spectacular, multicolored beaded jaguar, nearly three feet tall, made by members of an Indigenous group in Mexico usually called the Huichol and known in their native language as the Wixárika.
The Centennial Museum at the University of Texas at El Paso interprets the area’s natural and cultural history in galleries devoted to anthropology, biology, geology, and paleontology. The anthropology exhibit, developed partly by UTEP museum-studies students, features information about the region’s earliest peoples as well as El Paso firefighters. Temporary exhibits tackle challenging topics, such as immigration, inequality, and gender diversity, in an effort to promote reflection and dialogue. “We really feel like it’s our duty as an academic institution to be a place where those conversations can happen,” says director Daniel Carey-Whalen.
Process what you’ve learned on a stroll through the adjacent Chihuahuan Desert Gardens, which showcase more than six hundred species from the largest and most ecologically diverse desert in North America. Most are plants from the desert’s American and northernmost Mexican regions, such as the Chisos Red Oak, which grows only in West Texas. Carey-Whalen says the garden is meant to remind guests that deserts, which might initially appear barren, are full of natural beauty. The gardens host a semiannual plant sale that helps locals bring more of that beauty into their own yards. “So many people, if they tear out their lawn, just have rocks and maybe cacti, but all these amazing plants are going to be colorful at different times of year,” Carey-Whalen says. One of his favorites: Texas sage, also known as barometer bush, which erupts with vibrant purple blooms during monsoon season.
Before you go, check out the Lhakhang, a cultural artifact built in the style of a Bhutanese Buddhist temple. Located a short walk from the museum, the Lhakhang is open select days each month. If you can’t make it in person, take a virtual tour.
East Texas Oil Museum and Rangerette Showcase and Museum
Kilgore
Must-see: an original Rangerette uniform from 1940 (identical to today’s outfit, except with a considerably longer skirt).
In 1930, the discovery of oil near Kilgore practically doubled the town’s population overnight. Visitors to Kilgore College can learn about the boom at the East Texas Oil Museum, which includes a simulated “Elevator Ride to the Center of the Earth” that explains the region’s geology. Across campus, the Rangerette Showcase and Museum reveals how the college’s storied dance team was a byproduct of the oil boom. Weary of oil field workers’ game-day rowdiness, the college’s dean asked Gussie Nell Davis, a physical education teacher who had created a pep squad at Greenville High School, to come up with a halftime performance to keep fans in their seats and focused on the field. The Kilgore Rangerettes debuted in 1940, ultimately inspiring the hundreds of other dance and drill teams that thousands of Texans participate in today.
Museumgoers can marvel at memorabilia from the team’s history and peruse props the team has used on the field, such as chairs, hoops, and tambourines. A world map shows where the team has performed overseas, each location marked with a “K girl,” the team’s logo: an image of a smiling Rangerette with her arms above her head in a tilted V and a leg pointed to the side. A dancer struck the pose for a photo in 1965; Davis thought the shape looked like a K (for Kilgore) and commissioned an illustrator to sketch the woman. Strike your own K girl pose in front of a life-size photo of Rangerettes inside the museum or by the giant logo on the exterior wall.
Monnig Meteorite Gallery
Fort Worth
Must-see: Dar al Gani 476, a piece of the Martian surface displaced when another space object hit it. The fragment fell to Earth and was recovered in Libya in 1998.
When visitors touch the specimens at the Monnig Meteorite Gallery, they’re “holding a piece of space,” says curator Rhiannon Mayne. “I don’t think there’s any way of conveying in words how amazing that is.” The museum, on the campus of Texas Christian University, in Fort Worth, displays around 130 space rocks, a fraction of the collection, which Mayne, the Oscar and Juanita Monnig Endowed Chair of Meteoritics and Planetary Science at TCU, also uses in research. Most meteorites are fragments of asteroids, while a far smaller number—less than 1 percent of all meteorites—are bits of the moon or the Martian surface dislodged by the impact of another object. An entire room of the museum is dedicated to specimens found in Texas, including a sample from the Odessa Meteor Crater and a piece of meteorite that fell in February of last year in El Sauz, in the Rio Grande Valley. The collection doesn’t include any specimens from Tarrant County—yet. “I would really love someone to find one,” Mayne says.
It’s not for lack of trying. Mayne receives an email virtually every day from someone who thinks they’ve discovered a meteorite—99 percent of the finds are just regular rocks. A visit to the gallery will teach you what to look for: Meteorites have a black or brown outer covering, are generally magnetic, and are heavier than one would expect for the rock’s size.
Museum of the Big Bend
Alpine
Must-see: a model of the Quetzalcoatlus northropi, commonly known as the Texas pterosaur, the largest known flying animal—a fossil that was found in Big Bend National Park.
The Museum of the Big Bend in Alpine—named the best small-town museum in the country by USA Today this year—spans two buildings on the Sul Ross State University campus. The original, opened in 1937, contains a permanent exhibit about the area’s natural and cultural history, while an $11 million expansion that opened last summer is dedicated to art. In the older building’s Big Bend Legacy exhibit, you can explore immersive installations, such as a life-size replica of the pictograph at Tall Rockshelter, in the Davis Mountains, and a chapel in the style of Spanish missionary churches. More recent history is covered in an exhibit about Big Bend National Park, which opened in 1944. If you can’t make it all the way to the park’s popular 5.5-mile Window Trail, which culminates in a superb desert vista framed by rock walls, settle for what recently retired curator Matt Walter calls the “short and air-conditioned” version: a fifteen-foot-long simulated trail leading to a photo of the Window’s view.
Then learn about the fossils found in the park, including the flying Texas pterosaur, with a wingspan of nearly forty feet, and the Alamosaurus, whose fossilized vertebrae weighed as much as a thousand pounds and had to be extracted via helicopter. If your West Texas trip includes a visit to any of Alpine’s more than three dozen murals, be sure to check out the oversized map of the region painted on the museum’s wall in 1940 by Enrique Espinoza. The Sul Ross student went on to serve as an Army artist during World War II and later designed Christmas decorations for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Museum of the Coastal Bend
Victoria
Must-see: eight iron cannons, weighing more than eight hundred pounds each, from the unsuccessful French settlement of Fort St. Louis.
In the late 1680s, the explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, attempted to establish a French colony at the mouth of the Mississippi River. He missed, landing instead on the Texas coast at Matagorda Bay, where his ship La Belle was later wrecked. His colonists built a short-lived settlement on Garcitas Creek, just inland from Lavaca Bay and near the present-day town of Victoria. The Museum of the Coastal Bend, on the campus of Victoria College, is the official repository for artifacts from La Salle’s doomed settlement, Fort St. Louis. Galleries also display a timber from La Belle, excavated in 1996, and items that illustrate the unexpected side effects of the expedition. For instance, a length of rope from La Belle, when examined after its excavation, contained cockroach eggs; the insects, not native to North America, arrived on ships from Europe. “There was intentional colonization, and intentional exchange of goods and knowledge, and then there was the unintentional,” says Sue Prudhomme, museum director and executive director of cultural affairs at Victoria College. Non merci, France. Although the French attempt at colonization is a significant theme in the museum, galleries cover 13,000 years of regional history. In October the museum will debut the first phase of a four-thousand-square-foot exhibit about the origins of Texas ranching.
Spindletop Boomtown Museum
Beaumont
Must-see: the engineering and surveying building, complete with maps and equipment, and a room in the back where the engineer would have lived.
On January 10, 1901, drillers struck oil at Spindletop Hill, outside Beaumont, launching Texas’s transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy and the nation’s reliance on petroleum. Spindletop wasn’t the first successful Texas oil well, but it was by far the most dramatic. Oil erupted through the derrick in a gusher that was more than a hundred feet high. It spewed roughly 100,000 barrels a day for nine days, until workers finally were able to cap it. Boomtowns mushroomed near the oil field as wildcatters, roughnecks, and their families arrived.
The Spindletop Boomtown Museum, on Lamar University’s campus, which is surrounded by trappings of the modern-day petroleum industry, is made up of replica buildings including a barbershop, a saloon, a dry goods store, and an engineering and surveying building. “It really transports you back in time to 1901,” says museum director Jeanna Summy (except that the buildings are air-conditioned). On special occasions—and for guests willing to pay a $50 fee—a replica gusher shoots water 164 feet into the air for about two minutes.
Stephen F. Austin State University Gardens
Nacogdoches
Must-see: In the fall, the Ruby M. Mize Azalea Garden explodes with color as Japanese maple trees turn yellow, orange, red, and even purple.
The gardens on the Stephen F. Austin State University campus, in Nacogdoches, are an outdoor classroom where horticulture students learn to identify plants and forestry students hone their tree-climbing skills. The rest of us can enjoy a leisurely walk on seven miles of paved trails that wind through 138 acres of gardens, past outdoor sculptures and over burbling creeks. The Ruby M. Mize Azalea Garden is a popular destination in March and April, when its namesake flowers bloom, but its fall color is an unexpected treat. The nearby Mast Arboretum offers a shaded stroll beneath lofty evergreens, and the Kingham Children’s Garden includes a pollinator garden that draws butterflies and bumblebees. Across campus, Jimmy Hinds Park displays 66 types of native muscadine grapes, part of an SFA effort to identify a sweet and productive variety that the average home gardener can cultivate. Pause inside the two circles of bald cypresses known as “Treehenges” before following two miles of forest trails in the Pineywoods Native Plant Center. A bonus: Leashed dogs are allowed in all SFA gardens.
Sue S. Bancroft Women’s Leadership Hall
Denton
Must-see: Congresswoman Barbara Jordan’s handwritten tally of votes for the impeachment of President Nixon, accompanied by a video clip of her televised remarks about the impeachment.
Bold Texas women are the focus of the Sue S. Bancroft Women’s Leadership Hall at Texas Woman’s University, in Denton. In a gallery dedicated to the women’s suffrage movement, you can learn about Minnie Fisher Cunningham, who led the Texas Equal Suffrage Association and wrangled the right for women to vote in the state’s 1918 primary. Such party primaries were open only to whites, and the gallery explains the additional struggles that Black Texas suffragists such as Maude Sampson and Christia Adair endured in their campaign for the vote. Not sure if you’re registered? Ask a gallery attendant for a registration form or help connecting with a volunteer deputy registrar on campus.
A century after Texas women gained the right to vote, a record-breaking number of women ran for office. In 2018, Texas elected its first Latina congresswomen, and Harris County voters chose seventeen African American women as judges. An exhibit dedicated to that election gives the details. Feeling inspired? Stand at a lectern in front of a photo of the Texas Capitol and read excerpts of speeches given by Lady Bird Johnson, Barbara Jordan, Barbara Bush, and Chicana feminist movement leader Martha Cotera—or make your own statement. When you tap a button, a camera will snap your photo and email it to you, ready for use in your own campaign materials.
