Tuesday, August 8, 2000

Digging up area's history

The historical record of our area is fragmented, at best, much about its ancient people swallowed up in the passage of time.
   But a collaboration between Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi and the Corpus Christi Museum of Science and History is shedding new light on generations of forgotten pioneers, from American Indians to Tejanos, who helped shape the land that would become South Texas.
   To recover that past, an archaeological survey is being conducted on a 500,000-acre stretch of land following the Nueces River, from Calallen to near Lake Corpus Christi. The ongoing project involves nearly a dozen landowners along the site who are as interested in the land's history as any area scholar.
   "This area has a long history of drawing cultures and people together, and this archaeological work certainly illustrates that," said the Rev. Jose Salazar, pastor of St. Patrick's Church in Old San Patricio.
   Banding together
   Mike McCown, president of St. Patrick's parish council, has seen the work pique the interest of the community and band them together in a common pursuit.
   "This is as much a community effort as it is a university and museum effort," McCown noted. "Our history is a very important part of our lives that sometimes gets overlooked."
   Among the landowners participating in the project is Catherine Joan Bluntzer, whose property is located at the river at Farm-to-Market Road 666. Her grandfather, Nicholas Bluntzer, settled in the county in the 1860s.
   With so much urban growth heading toward Sandia and Mathis, Bluntzer hopes the archaeological team works quickly to recover as much as possible before construction and roadwork complicate matters.
   Rich multicultural history
   "There's at least six subdivisions now out by the river," she said. "People find things every day and they don't even know what they are. We need to find as much as we can before things get built on top of everything."
   As the years bring more roads to the area, quickly followed not only by through traffic but new residents settling in the area, the need to recover and preserve its rich multicultural history becomes ever more apparent, Salazar said.
   "If we recover this beautiful history, we can then pass it on to others moving here and give them a deeper sense of the land's richness," he explained.
   Dig results will be presented during a potluck dinner at 4 p.m. Aug. 27 at St. Patrick's parish hall, located 4 miles north of Farm-to-Market Road 624 on FM 666.
  
  
  
 

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