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A spectator at the annual July 4th celebration
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The Texas Frontier Heritage & Cultural Center™ provides a complete offering of history-related services centered on the Buffalo Gap Historic Village. It offers educational programming to meet the needs of the general public and public school teachers; and leads the way in heritage and cultural tourism and in history education.
Of course, like most things, how the Center actually came to be is more complicated than one would expect. The original buildings of the Buffalo Gap Historic Village were assembled around the Buffalo Gap courthouse over a number of years and purchased by the McWhiney History Education Group in 1999.
The McWhiney History Education Group (formerly the Grady McWhiney Research Foundation) is a non-profit organization that is a legacy of the noted Southern historian Dr. Grady McWhiney (1928-2006). Its goal, as befitting McWhiney's academic interests, is to advance the study of Southern, Civil War, and Texas history. The Foundation has pursued that goal through sponsorship of various educational activities, especially publication of general-interest books on the Civil War and Texana through its State House Press publishing arm. Assuming maintenance of the Village and its artifacts was a logical step in the furtherance of those interests, for the site provided a venue where people could actually see what the history of one part of the Texas frontier once looked like, rather than just reading about it.
...as well as visits from famous
(supposedly dead) historical
personalities.
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The Foundation also acquired several properties adjacent to the actual grounds of the Village, such as The Parsonage and the Riddell House. The Parsonage provides convenient lodging for individual visitors to the Village; and the Boone House offers sufficient accomodation for small groups attending conferences or family reunions.
The final step was to combine all these separate but complementary undertakings — the Village, the State House Press, and The Parsonage — under a single umbrella. The result: the Texas Frontier Heritage & Cultural Center™.
The ultimate goal in all this has never changed. It is history education, making the contours of Texas and Southern history as accessible to the general public as possible. Our publications are designed for a wide readership, not academic specialists; and the Village provides a physical setting for the study of history through both general viewing of its artifacts and participation in specific activities.
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