Museum of the Big Bend: A Century of the Trans-Pecos
Near Alpine, Texas
On the campus of Sul Ross State University in Alpine stands a museum that has spent close to ninety years collecting the material history of one of the most remote regions in the United States. The Museum of the Big Bend opened in the nineteen thirties, roughly fifteen years after the university itself opened, and it has been gathering artifacts, photographs, documents, and specimens from the Trans-Pecos ever since. The collection today holds more than twenty-five thousand objects, ranging from prehistoric stone tools left by the people who inhabited this desert for thousands of years before any European arrived, through the Spanish colonial period, the ranching frontier, and the railroad age to the present.
The museum also holds an extensive collection of natural history specimens from the Chihuahuan Desert ecosystem. For visitors approaching Big Bend National Park from the north, the Museum of the Big Bend offers a grounding introduction to the region's layered past. It is free to the public, one of the quiet cultural anchors of Alpine, and arguably the best single place to understand what this enormous, difficult, beautiful corner of Texas actually is.
The Center for Big Bend Studies, housed on the same campus, conducts ongoing archaeological and historical research across the Trans-Pecos region.
