Thanks to nearly a million dollars’ worth of donated steel, the Milburn-Price Culture Museum in Vega, Texas, is planning a big expansion.
KFDA-TV in nearby Amarillo reports:
The steel will be used to build a 7,000 square foot expansion, exceeding and replacing one that was built in the 1950s.
Some of the museum’s larger artifacts don’t fit in the current space and bad insulation makes it difficult to preserve them.
“They were just put up in sections and wasn’t really planned out, they just added a building here and kept it going toward the south,” said Conn. “So we’re going to redo that and have a little more attractive and easier. More flow to the building. Right now, it’s kind of chopped up the way it’s laid out and we’ve been able to use it, but in the winter, it’s cold and in the summer, it’s hot back in some of those buildings.”
“Right now the back part of our museum does not have insulation, we don’t have very much room,” said Karen Conn. “So I think with this new steel that we have it will allow us to display more artifacts that we do have that have been donated to us.”
The museum made headlines a few months ago when it commissioned what it described as the world’s largest branding iron — a 22-foot-long, 3,000-pounder with the XIT Ranch logo. The XIT Ranch operated in the Texas Panhandle, including Vega, from 1885 to 1912.
The Milburn-Price Culture Museum sits a half-block from Route 66 at 1005 Coke St. and a half-block from the Old Magnolia Station, also on the Mother Road. The nonprofit museum seeks to educate the public about the history and culture of the Oldham county area.
(Image of the Milburn-Price Culture Museum in Vega, Texas, by Barbara Bannon via Flickr)