Tag: texas

Posted on by

Ancient Web: Texas Water Towers Made Roadside Infrastructure Worth Stopping For

A water tower is one of those things most people notice only when it has the town’s name painted on it and they need to know where the hell they are.

Visit Texas Water Towers

TexasWaterTowers.com gives them considerably more attention than that.

The site is a photographic archive of towers around Texas, organized town by town and mixed with short bits of local geography and history. Pages for places such as Galveston, Round Rock, Hutto, Temple, Manor, and Sealy pair photographs with just enough context to turn the tower into part of the town rather than an isolated object.

Infrastructure becomes a travel collection

The Temple page is a good example of what makes the archive useful.

It does not just show finished towers. One set of photographs documents a new tower while it was still under construction in April 2007, with workers visible inside the tank before the top had been installed.

Elsewhere the site wanders into related collections: Texas wall art, postcards, toys, dolls, books, records, a 1928 Model A, and a 1964 Corvette.

That drift is pure personal web.

A modern niche site would probably insist on staying “on brand.” A personal homepage can begin with water towers and then quietly admit that the people behind it also collect postcards and children’s books.

The photographs are credited to Kay, and the pages preserve a road-trip rhythm: town name, county, a location note, a little history, then the structure itself.

There is no attempt to make municipal water infrastructure glamorous.

That is what makes it good.

A tower that thousands of drivers pass without thinking can become historically useful once someone photographs it before repainting, replacement, demolition, or redevelopment changes the scene.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes pages like this because mundane infrastructure becomes valuable surprisingly fast once somebody bothers to document it consistently.

Texas has a lot of sky.

Apparently it also has enough water towers to justify an entire website.

Return to Texas Water Towers

Posted on by

Ancient Web: John and Mary Kormendy Watched One Texas Yard for 22 Years

A backyard bird list becomes something else when the same people keep it for twenty-two years.

Visit John and Mary Kormendy’s House Birds page

From spring 2000 until summer 2022, John and Mary Kormendy lived near Dripping Springs in the Texas Hill Country and kept track of the birds around their house.

By the end, the page recorded 125 species seen and two more heard.

That is already useful.

The comments make it better.

Natural history at household scale

The page does not read like a generic species guide. It records what happened at this particular place.

Some birds were breeding residents. Others appeared only during migration or cold weather. Some once-common visitors became rare. A Rufous hummingbird overwintered at the property for multiple years. A Crested caracara appeared only twice in roughly two decades. Golden-cheeked warblers passed through even though the property did not have enough mature oak habitat for them to breed there.

The notes are full of small observations that field guides cannot provide.

Mary once saw a roadrunner leap from the roof to catch a Black-chinned hummingbird. Black vultures sat together on the upstairs deck. Woodpeckers hunted insects from the railing. Ringtails occasionally arrived and moved through the trees “like ballerinas.”

The Kormendys say they updated the pages heavily during 2020, when pandemic restrictions kept them home and paying closer attention. By late that year they had photographs of 64 of the 125 species on the list.

The archive also records change.

The couple moved to downtown Austin in 2022. The page says one final update remained and then the house-bird site would be “finished forever.”

That phrase is strangely perfect for a personal web page.

The site did not fail.

The observation period ended.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes personal natural-history sites because they preserve long spans of attention that are difficult to reconstruct later.

One yard, watched long enough, becomes a dataset with stories attached.

Return to the House Birds page