Big Spring is the hometown of the Heritage Museum of Big Spring, a local non-profit. The museum has a collection of 40,000 items, including things you’d expect, like oil field equipment, and things you wouldn’t, like shells from shipwrecks.
The museum also collects things that are both surprising and strange. One exhibit has a set of 26 empty tin cans, each with a different letter painted on it.
Nobody figured out what the letters stood for, or why they were painted on empty cans. The museum guesses that the tin cans might have been used in some kind of mechanical game. But one of the museum’s curators has a different theory: the letters might have been taken from train car graffiti from 1923, before the invention of spray paint. But that’s just a guess.
Museum displays are often like that. Museum curators are people who have found something cool and want to share it. But they don’t always know what the most interesting story might be. The museum’s curators did know one interesting story: the story of why the museum exists and where it is.
The museum curators were high school kids in Big Spring in the late 1960’s. At the time, Big Spring was a quiet little town. But Big Spring was also an oil boom town, and a lot of young people were pouring into Big Spring.
Big Spring’s high school had just one computer. So that’s what the high school students in 1967 did: they organized a fundraising campaign, and organized their first museum exhibition. They bought an old school desk, and when payday came they placed it in the school’s “old gym.” Then they put “The Heritage Museum” sign on the desk.
The Heritage Museum of Big Spring TX offers various exhibits and hosts events.
The Heritage Museum, located in Big Spring, TX, offers a historical overview of the town’s past.
