UPDATE on Partners:
Texas Office
St. Olaf Lutheran Church in Cranfills Gap, TX, is one of the many houses of worship being documented by the Texas Sacred Places
Project website. Photo by Robert Frase.
Partners’ Texas Office initiated the Texas Sacred Places
Project (TSPP) in 2007, collaborating with historians,
preservationists, architects, clergy, and universities
statewide to locate, document, and catalogue the history and
current realities of historic religious structures throughout
the state, raising their visibility on a broad scale, and helping
to make the case for their preservation. The goal is to
encourage residents and local officials to take an active role
in maintaining these structures or consider adaptive uses for
them.
A major milestone for the project was completed recently
with the launch of the Texas Sacred Places Project website,
which serves as both a database for information currently
collected for the project and an easily accessible resource
for historians, educators, preservationists, architects,
and congregations. The website will retain the project’s
completed surveys, consolidate information from state and
federal resources, and serve as a medium for the exchange of
histories and photographs. Currently, the website contains
survey information, documented histories, photographs,
and measured drawings compiled from agencies such as
the Texas Historical Commission, National Register of
Historic Places, and the Historic American Buildings Survey
(HABS) and Historic American Engineering Record (HAER)
Collections of the National Park Service.
While the website is a resource of information, it also
provides an online location in which users can input their
own histories, stories, and photographs as past and current
congregation members. Currently, information is uploaded
through an online contact form, but eventually, the process
will be more interactive, with users uploading content
directly from their computers.
For sacred structures that no longer have congregations or
are abandoned, the website provides a place to document
these sites before they are lost. The website also provides
congregations links to the resources of Partners’ Texas
Office. Work continues on the Texas Sacred Places Project and
its website as we encourage the public to tell us about the
sites currently listed and those that have been previously
undocumented. Aspects of the project will be launched
in phases as additional sites are inventoried and research
continues.
Texas Advisory Board Members
James R. Nader, FAIA, Chair
Kenneth Barr
Cynthia Boyd
Diane Bumpas
Richard H. Bundy, AIA
Kris Calvert
Louise B. Carvey
Robert I. Fernandez
Donald Gatzke, AIA
Marty Leonard
Robert F. Pence, PE
The Reverend Brenda W. Weir
Ex Officio
Fernando Costa
Randle Harwood
William J. Thornton, Jr.
Sacred Places • Fall 2013 • 14