Industry & Invention

La Vernia, TX

After the Civil War, brothers Isaac and George Washington Suttles left Zanesville, Ohio—a noted pottery region—for Texas, where they turned the sandy clay near La Vernia into bricks and salt-glazed stoneware. An 1877 newspaper praised their craftsmanship and the strong local demand for their wares, and around 1882 they moved their kiln into town near this site. Isaac was killed in Abilene in 1884, but George kept the pottery running for years, and archaeology of the kiln, waster piles, and glazing techniques still illuminates the trade.

Sonora, TX

The site of the Sutton County Courthouse began as something more elemental than government: the first water well in the area, where sheepmen brought their flocks to drink and decided to settle. That same scarce water bred violence — a deadly quarrel over watering rights left one West Texas family patriarch dead on the very ground where the courthouse would rise. The story compresses the ranching frontier's hard bargains into a single contested spot.

Exeter, NH

Swasey Parkway runs along the tidal Squamscott River in Exeter, the gift of native son Ambrose Swasey, an inventor and machine-tool maker who was born here in 1846 before making his fortune building precision instruments and astronomical telescope mounts. Dedicated in 1930, the riverside promenade was his way of giving something lasting back to the New Hampshire town of his childhood. More than ninety years on, it endures as a green civic space where residents still stroll, gather, and watch the river slip past.

Exeter, NH

This riverside parkway along the Squamscott River was a 1931 gift to the town of Exeter from Ambrose Swasey, a New Hampshire-born mechanical engineer and industrialist who rose from a Northfield farm to co-found the Warner & Swasey Company of Cleveland. That firm became famous for precision machine tools and for building some of the era's great astronomical telescopes, and Swasey channeled the fortune he earned into philanthropy for his native state. In dedicating the parkway he gave Exeter a lasting stretch of public green space where the town could gather along the water.

Bethlehem Township, NJ

From 1868 into the 1930s, the Swayze Mine worked a vein of magnetite — a rich iron ore — in the New Jersey Highlands, a district whose mines helped feed the young nation's hunger for iron. This was modest work by the standards of the great ranges, its deepest shaft reaching about seventy-five feet, but such small mines dotted these hills and sustained local livelihoods for generations. Today only ruins mark where miners once brought ore to the surface.

Houston, TX

Rising on a Houston corner with a three-story turret and ornate Eastlake trim, this late-Victorian commercial block was designed by architect George E. Dickey in 1889, possibly reworking an 1861 building on the site. It housed the jewelry firm of John Jasper Sweeney and Edward L. Coombs, who had bought the property in 1882, with Gus Fredericks joining before the decade was out. The exuberant brickwork captures the confidence of Gilded Age Houston as it grew into a regional commercial hub.

Angleton, TX

Tennessee native Rees P. Sweeny built this raised Victorian house in 1896, the very year Angleton became the seat of Brazoria County. As the county's tax collector, Sweeny relocated here as part of the transition from the older county seat at Brazoria. Set sturdily on high ground with a central-hall plan, his home has repeatedly sheltered neighbors during the floods and hurricanes that sweep the Gulf coast.

Old Ocean, TX

After fighting in the Texas Revolution, John Sweeny, Jr. received this land from his father, one of the region's large landholders, and in 1837 enslaved workers built the plantation house entirely from brick, nails, and lumber produced on the property. The plantation raised molasses, cotton, and sugar, the cash crops of the antebellum Gulf Coast. The land has remained in the family's hands for generations.

Sweetwater, TX

The paper that became the Sweetwater Reporter began in 1881 as the Sweetwater Advance, founded the same year Nolan County was organized by C.E. Gilbert, who had also started the Abilene Reporter. After John Millsapps bought and modernized it in 1906, he and his partners launched daily editions under the Reporter name in 1911. A later owner, Houston Harte, went on to help build the national Harte-Hanks publishing firm.

Stamford, TX

Swen Magnus Swenson, the first Swedish settler in Texas and an ally of Sam Houston, began buying vast West Texas tracts here in 1854. His sons built the operation into the SMS Ranches, running shorthorn and Hereford cattle under a distinctive reversed-S brand that is still used today. Incorporated in 1926 and headquartered here from 1927, the company grew to more than 500,000 acres and pioneered innovations like a mail-order cattle system before splitting into four family corporations in 1978.

Stamford, TX

Around 1900, the Texas Central Railroad and the SMS Ranch teamed up to create the town of Stamford, and this stout Lueders-stone building rose beside the tracks to serve it. It was the central supply depot for the four sprawling Swenson ranches of west Texas — Tongue River, Spur, Throckmorton and Flat Top. Goods came off the trains and waited here until ranch foremen rode into town to collect provisions and swap news.

Fort Worth, TX

By the 1880s Swift & Company was a national meatpacking giant, and its strategy of building plants near the herds drew it to Texas and its vast livestock. Recruited by the Fort Worth Stock Yards Company, Swift opened this plant in 1903, quickly reshaping the city's economy and spawning a railway, a publishing firm, and other support businesses. The operation ran until 1971.

Tulia, TX

Before this hospital opened, Swisher County residents relied on local doctors or made the long trip to Amarillo for serious care. As the population grew in the 1920s, voters approved a 1926 bond to build a proper facility, completed two years later with twelve beds across two floors and a basement. A major 1946 addition kept it in service as the county hospital until a new building replaced it in 1969.

Dallas, TX

What began as a muddy country lane, named in 1857 by Swiss immigrant Henri Boll for his homeland, became one of Dallas's grandest boulevards. In 1905 cotton-gin manufacturer R. S. Munger paved and extended Swiss Avenue as the spine of his exclusive Munger Place development, imposing minimum costs and two-story heights while letting owners choose from Tudor, Georgian, and Prairie styles. By 1920 some 200 elegant homes housed the city's lawyers, bankers, and industrialists, and after mid-century decline, citizen preservationists won the neighborhood designation as Dallas's first historic district in 1973.

Sonoma, CA

Built around 1850 by Don Salvador Vallejo beside his earlier 1836 dwelling, this adobe passed through many hands. In 1861 it was home to Dr. Victor J. Faure, who made prize-winning wines from the Vallejo family's grapes, tying the building to Sonoma's founding role in California viticulture. Later use as a hotel and restaurant gave it the name Swiss Hotel.

Jim Thorpe, PA · est. 1971

Built in 1827, the Mauch Chunk Switchback Railroad used nothing but gravity to roll loaded coal cars nine miles down the mountain from the Summit Hill mines to the Lehigh Canal, with mules riding along to haul the empties back up. In 1844 engineers added back-tracks and inclined planes so the whole return trip could also be made by gravity. Once a marvel of early industrial engineering, it later became one of America's first tourist thrill rides—a forerunner of the roller coaster.

Lackawaxen Township, PA · est. 1948

In the reform-charged 1840s, newspaper editor Horace Greeley helped bankroll a utopian community on this ground, inspired by the French socialist Charles Fourier and by New England's Brook Farm. The Sylvania Colony pooled property and shared labor equally, betting that cooperation could build a better society. Killing July frosts wiped out its crops, and the experiment collapsed in 1845.

Emporium, PA · est. 2021

Founded in 1907 in the small mountain town of Emporium, Sylvania Electric grew into a national name in vacuum tubes and electronics. During World War II its workers—largely women—produced vacuum tubes for the proximity fuze, a device that let artillery shells detonate near their targets and dramatically improved accuracy. The reliance on a female workforce led Collier's to dub Emporium "Girls Town USA," and the Poplar Street plant ran until 1990.

Canyon, TX

In the fall of 1877, cattlemen drove some 400 head to Spring Draw and raised a two-room log cabin, seeding one of the Panhandle's great open-range operations. Under the firm of Gunter, Munson & Summerfield, cowboys strung the area's first barbed wire around 240,000 acres and, in 1882, moved more than 10,600 cattle in what was called the largest drive on record. Through strikes, drought and blizzard the T Anchor endured, and when Randall County organized in 1889 six of its first officers were ranch hands, before the land was broken into smaller farms and ranches after 1902.

San Saba, TX

Thomas Alan Sloan came to San Saba County from Mississippi in 1856 and rose to prominence in the cattle business as Central Texas moved from open range toward fenced pasture. In 1883 he and his wife Emma built this two-story frame house, a settled emblem of ranching wealth in a county still recovering from war and frontier raids. It stood for generations as the family seat of a pioneering ranching line.

San Antonio, TX

Thomas Claiborne Frost came to Texas in 1855 as a teacher, then became a lawyer, Texas Ranger, and Confederate officer before settling into commerce in San Antonio. His mercantile and wool business on this site grew into something more when customers began trusting him to hold their money in his sturdy safe—an informal service that he gradually built into the Frost National Bank, chartered in 1899. In 1922 the bank raised a twelve-story tower here, a landmark of the city's business district until the bank moved on in 1973.

San Antonio, TX

A former Texas Ranger and Confederate soldier, Thomas C. Frost turned to the wool commission trade in San Antonio in the 1870s, buying wool from producers statewide and storing it in warehouses on this site until prices rose. By letting growers avoid selling into a low market, his storage business helped build up the Texas wool industry. Frost gradually began acting as a banker for his customers and ultimately founded the Frost National Bank.

League City, TX

Thomas Jackson and Mary Lelia Dick ran the Buckhorn Ranch in north Galveston County for years before building this house in 1904, a fine two-story center-passage home with a double gallery trimmed in turned columns, latticework, and balustrade. T. J. Dick was acclaimed for his part in building the Galveston Seawall, the great barrier raised after the deadly 1900 hurricane. The couple divorced in 1920, but the house stayed in Mary Lelia's family until 1989.

McCamey, TX

When oil exploration set west Texas boomtowns roaring in the 1920s, McCamey needed places to blow off steam — and Tom Bargesser and Perry Fitzsimmons obliged, opening the T.P. Tavern in 1927 and lending it their initials. A fixture of the west Texas roadhouse circuit, it drew huge crowds to its wooden dance floor and hosted touring performers who went on to national fame, including Ernest Tubb, Lawrence Welk, and Bob Wills. Rattlesnake derbies and boxing matches shared the bill until fire took the building in 1976.

Westbrook, TX

In 1920 the well named for leasing agent W. H. Abrams struck oil, the first commercial discovery in what became the vast Permian Basin. When the well was "shot" with nitroglycerin that July, a crowd of 2,000 watched oil and gas erupt nearly to the top of the derrick. The strike opened one of the greatest oil regions in the United States, later revived through water-flooding to recover tens of millions more barrels.

Taft, TX

Laid out along the rail line in 1900 by the Coleman-Fulton Pasture Company, Taft was designed from the start as a model community to lure Northern investors and farmers. At its heart the company built a sprawling agricultural-industrial complex—a slaughter and packing house, cold storage and ice plant, cottonseed oil mill, cotton gins, a creamery, and more. As land values rose and the company sold off its holdings, the once-tightly-controlled company town diversified into an independent community.

Columbus, TX

Physician and civil engineer Charles William Tait came from Alabama in 1844 and opened the 6,000-acre Sylvania Plantation, growing cotton, corn, and cane and firing brick and lime. Enslaved workers hewed the logs and fired the brick that built the plantation headquarters compound in 1847. A grandson relocated and restored the double log barn and slave cabin here in 1969–70.

Eureka County, NV

The Tannehill brothers raised this cabin in 1864 as one of the first houses in the new mining camp of Eureka, living in it about a year before selling their claims to a New York company. It later passed through many hands, including the pioneering mercantile firm of Nathan & Harrison. Having survived fires, floods, and the passage of time, the cabin endures as a rare relic of Eureka's earliest days.

Hamiltonban Township, PA · est. 1967

In 1836, as Pennsylvania threw itself into a canal-and-railroad building spree, the state chartered a rail line through the rugged Adams County countryside, pushed hard by the young Gettysburg lawyer and future Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens. Critics mocked its winding route through the hills as the "Tapeworm," and the project—never finished as planned—was put up for sale by 1842. Its abandoned granite viaduct still stands nearby as a monument to an overambitious age of internal improvements.

New Orleans, LA

This uptown corner sits in Hurstville, laid out by Cornelius Hurst in 1832 as the first of New Orleans' uptown faubourgs, or suburbs, as the young American city pushed upriver from its Creole core. In 1941 businessman George J. Palmer and his wife Juliette built their family home here as a loving replica of Tara, the plantation house from the 1939 film "Gone with the Wind" — a striking example of how a Hollywood image of the Old South shaped real Southern architecture. The site had already seen an 1894 residence and, later, a colorful chapter under Jackson Brewing Company president Lawrence Fabacher, who added a casino, greenhouses, and a stable before it was all cleared in 1940.

Port Aransas, TX

Frank Stephenson opened the Tarpon Inn in an old barracks in 1886, naming it for the trophy fish that crowded the nearby Gulf and giving Port Aransas its early nickname of 'Tarpon.' Repeatedly rebuilt after fires and hurricanes, the inn was reinforced with deep-set pilings and became famous for the signed tarpon scales guests pinned to its walls. Its guest book runs to the famous—President Franklin D. Roosevelt fished here in 1937, and Duncan Hines honeymooned here and praised its table for decades.

Grapevine, TX

Built in 1897 as retail space, this brick Grapevine building was bought and remodeled by the Tarrant County State Bank in 1921, then became home to the Grapevine Sun newspaper in 1947. Its Classical Revival facade—stepped parapet, stone coping, and four pilasters beneath a dentilled cornice—marks the confident commercial architecture of a growing North Texas town. The building's changing tenants trace the everyday commerce and civic life of Main Street.

Liberty, TX

For more than a century the Tarver Abstract Company has traced land titles for the citizens of Liberty County. Tennessee-born Thomas Carey Tarver, a Confederate veteran who once rode as a Wells Fargo messenger, bought a decade-old abstract business in 1903 and gave it his name. Over the years the firm evolved from producing abstracts of title to issuing regulated title insurance, becoming an anchor of Liberty's downtown business district.

Columbus, TX

This Columbus landmark grew in layers that read like a timeline of small-town Texas prosperity: a modest one-story cottage raised about 1867 by Phocian Tate, given a second story and exuberant Victorian porches by merchant A. Senftenberg in 1887, and extended again by Kenneth Brandon in 1900. Its basement, laid with locally made Columbus brick, survives alongside much of the early fabric, and in 1968 the house was acquired to be restored as a period-furnished museum.

Corsicana, TX

Built before 1900 by William M. Tatum, son of a pioneer Corsicana merchant, this colonial revival mansion boasts first-floor Palladian windows and massive Ionic columns framing a two-story porch. His son Clifford, who later ran the family hardware business, brought his bride to live in his parents' home, and the younger Tatums raised their family and lived out their lives here. The house stayed in the family until 1970.

White Pine County, NV

When Taylor and John Platt struck silver and gold here in 1873, a typical mining town sprang up around the Argus and Monitor mines, and within seven years it claimed thousands of residents, saloons, general stores, an opera house, and a Wells Fargo office. By the mid-1880s Taylor was the hub of county life, famous for its annual Fourth of July celebration. Mining sputtered on until 1919, when a cyanide plant briefly revived the district, and the local mines ultimately gave up more than three million dollars in silver, gold, copper, and lead.

Austin, TX

Scottish immigrant Peter C. Taylor built this kiln in 1871, using his own patented continuous-firing design to turn quarried limestone into high-grade lime. The mortar it produced bound together many of Austin's late-19th-century buildings and found buyers well beyond Texas. Fed by stone hauled from a nearby slough and worked until the 1890s, Taylor's two-kiln complex was a genuine engine of the growing city's economy.

Taylor, TX

Organized in 1888 and completed in 1894, the Taylor National Bank rose in red sandstone from a design by Austin architect A. O. Watson, blending Romanesque and Renaissance Revival detailing in limestone, granite, and pressed metal. Over the years the building also housed a law firm, a Weather Bureau office, and a refining company. After a 1930s merger, the successor bank stayed here until 1967.

Rosenberg, TX

Businessman Norman P. Teague and his wife Sidney Claire built this two-story home in 1910, its columns and Classical Revival trim in the height of fashion. It stood among the fine houses of what locals called Rosenberg's "Silk Stocking Row," a street of the town's prosperous families. Jake Waddell bought it in 1925, and his family held it for more than forty years.

Houston, TX

The Teas Nursery Company grew from humble roots in 1843, when John C. Teas began selling apples out of his Indiana backyard before becoming a nationally known horticulturist in Missouri. In 1908 his son Edward met developer W. W. Baldwin, who hired him to design the plantings for the new town of Bellaire, and by 1910 the family had relocated to Houston to open the nursery here. Its crews shaped the landscapes of Rice Institute and the River Oaks subdivision, and by 1951 the firm had planted more than a million trees across the Houston area.

Matador, TX

In the 1870s, when the southern buffalo herd still darkened the plains of West Texas, traders threw up a rough camp of picket houses and tents where the Middle Pease River meets Tee Pee Creek, naming it for the abandoned tipi poles scattered along the water. Charles Rath and his partners hauled in wagons, cattle, and dance-hall gear to profit from the hide trade before moving on. As the hunters emptied the range, Tee Pee City settled into a hard-drinking outpost of saloons, gambling, and gunplay wild enough to draw the Texas Rangers, until the Matador Land and Cattle Company bought the land and shut the saloon in 1904.

Kern County, CA

The Tehachapi Loop is one of the engineering marvels of American railroading, a spiraling stretch of track completed in 1876 that lets trains climb the steep Tehachapi Mountains by looping over themselves. Long trains here can pass above their own rear cars, a sight that has drawn railfans for generations. The overlook interprets how 19th-century engineers conquered terrain that once seemed impassable.

Temple, TX

The Temple Daily Telegram, dating to 1907, traces its lineage to the Weekly Times launched in 1881, the year the railroad town of Temple was founded. Under publisher Frank W. Mayborn, who took sole ownership in 1930, the paper became a powerful civic force, championing the reservoirs that became Belton and Stillhouse Hollow dams. Its advocacy also helped bring Camp Hood, a general hospital, and federal facilities to the region.

Navasota, TX

Built in the mid-1890s for newlyweds Ward B. and Annie Foster Templeman, this Navasota home rose during the town's cotton-boom prosperity. Originally a Queen Anne design, it was later bricked and reworked in the Prairie School style, keeping its wraparound porch, multi-light windows, and a copper-clad dome atop a corner turret. It stands as a showpiece of a cotton economy flush enough to build in the latest fashions.

Rockwall, TX

This modest cabin, built around 1920 and moved here from the Pullen Farm on Highway 205, once housed a tenant farming family in Rockwall County. In the decades after Reconstruction, tenant farming and sharecropping shaped rural Texas life, with families working land they did not own in exchange for a share of the crop. The preserved dwelling offers a rare, tangible look at that hardscrabble agricultural world.

Terlingua, TX

In the Chihuahuan Desert near the Big Bend, Terlingua boomed after an 1890 strike of cinnabar—the ore that yields mercury, or "quicksilver." For a few decades it ranked among the nation's leading sources of the metal, and Howard E. Perry's Chisos Mining Company drew some 2,000 workers to a company town complete with a hilltop mansion, jail, church, and theater. When the mines flooded and mercury prices fell after World War II, the town emptied, leaving the desert ruins that make it one of Texas's most famous ghost towns.

Aransas Pass, TX

The original Aransas Harbor Terminal Railroad, built in 1892, hauled rock from mainland quarries to build the jetties guarding the pass. When a deep-water channel was dredged to Harbor Island, the displaced sediment formed a roadbed, and a new terminal railroad opened in 1912 along eight trestles, becoming an important cotton-shipping link. During World War I its "Toonerville Trolley"—coaches pulled by a converted Model T truck—carried workers to a Harbor Island shipyard. Business faded after Corpus Christi became a deep-water port in 1922.

Panhandle, TX

Renamed from "Carson City" in 1887, Panhandle was expected to boom as the meeting point of two railroads — until the Fort Worth & Denver City line swung 16 miles south, seeding Amarillo instead. Yet the town thrived anyway as a shipping hub, moving more freight during the great ranching era and the 1926 oil boom than any other stop on the Santa Fe line except Chicago.

Post, TX

Terrace Cemetery grew out of the earliest days of Post City, the model town founded on the Caprock in 1907 by cereal magnate C.W. Post. When two young deaths made a burial ground necessary, the Double U Company appealed to Post at his Battle Creek, Michigan headquarters; he supplied both land and a layout, along with a somber note on bowing to a power greater than his own. Platted at just under twenty acres in 1912, the cemetery has since grown to hold several thousand graves.

Post, TX

When cereal magnate C. W. Post founded Post City in 1908, workers gathered round rocks from nearby ranch canyons to build the piers of this cemetery gateway. Scottish immigrants George Samson and James Napier designed and built it, and Samson went on to serve the community as a leader for half a century.

Panhandle, TX

When Carson County's oil boom peaked in the 1920s, Panhandle became a hub for oil-field supply houses and lodging was scarce. Clark and Margaret Downs opened the Downs Hotel in 1926 to meet the demand; it became the Texan Hotel after changing hands in 1932. Later converted partly to apartments, it still welcomed a few guests after World War II and, by the early 21st century, was the last boom-era hotel in Panhandle still operating.

Texarkana, TX

Texarkana was born from a railroad land auction in December 1873, when the Texas & Pacific platted lots to open a regional shipping point at a spot long used as an Indian trade trail between the Mississippi and Mexico. Its distinctive name, blending Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana, had been floating around before the town even existed, claimed by everyone from a physician to a medicine-show barker. Incorporated separately on each side of the state line, it grew from 40 auction-goers into a city of tens of thousands within a century.

Marshall, TX

Marshall's first railroad reached Caddo Lake by 1858 to connect with Red River steamboats, but the town's fortunes soared when Congress in 1871 chartered the Texas & Pacific to build west along the 32nd parallel. The T&P moved its maintenance shops to Marshall, and in 1911–12 built this passenger depot at the junction of the Texarkana and Louisiana lines. Its architect blended prairie school lines with Renaissance and Mediterranean details, crowning the brick-and-concrete station with a tile roof to anchor the view down Washington Street from the courthouse.

Terrell, TX

Terrell was born in 1873 along the route of the Texas & Pacific Railroad, its land donated by local families on the condition that a depot be built here. The first frame depot rose that year and quickly grew as freight traffic swelled; this brick freight depot replaced it in 1911 during a wave of national rail expansion. It served the region's economy until closing in 1977, retaining its broad hipped roof and freight doors.

Fort Worth, TX

The Texas & Pacific Railroad reached Fort Worth in 1876 and became a driving force in the city's growth. In 1931 company officials, led by president John L. Lancaster, built this passenger terminal—a striking Art Deco design by architect Wyatt C. Hedrick. As rail travel declined through the 1950s, the terminal saw the city's last T&P passenger train depart on March 22, 1967.

Colorado City, TX

When the Texas & Pacific Railway pushed through this valley in 1880, it turned a scatter of tents and dugouts into the "Cattle Capital of West Texas." Ranchers like Charles Goodnight and the great XIT had already trailed herds into a country where the last buffalo were vanishing and Texas Rangers guarded against raids. By April 1881 the railhead served some 350 residents with a county government, school, and newspaper, and soon shipped out thousands of cattle and freighted in the barbed wire and windmills that fenced the open range.

Baird, TX

The Texas & Pacific Railway reached this spot in 1880, platting a town by the camp of surveyor Matthew Baird and soon building a roundhouse and division-point depot. Baird prospered, becoming county seat in 1883. The present two-story brick depot, raised in 1911 in a Prairie style with a distinctive Flemish parapet, replaced an earlier frame building and stood as the town's landmark until the railroad left it in 1977.

Fort Worth, TX

On February 15, 1877, ranchers from northwest Texas met in the Young County Courthouse in Graham to fight the cattle rustling plaguing the open range. They formed the Stock-Raisers' Association of North-West Texas, pooling brands, marks, and ranch records to track stolen stock. Growing into a statewide body headquartered in Fort Worth, it drew in cattle barons like C.C. Slaughter and Burk Burnett and became a lasting force in the Texas cattle industry.

Spur, TX

Opened in December 1909 on land given by the Swenson land and cattle company, the Rolling Plains station (Substation No. 7) was one of seven experiment stations the Texas Legislature authorized that year to solve regional farming problems. Scientists here pioneered soil and water conservation, including a terracing method called the "syrup pan" that captured scarce rainfall and boosted crop yields. Work at the station helped shape national soil-conservation policy and brush-control and livestock research still felt worldwide.

Denton, TX

After the railroads reached Denton County, subsistence farming gave way to cash crops bound for distant markets, and in 1910 the state placed one of its Hatch Act–funded agricultural experiment stations here as Station No. 6. Relocated to the Luper farm in 1913 after soil trouble, its scientists spent six decades breeding hardier grains — cold-tolerant oats like Nortex and Mustang, wheats such as Quanah and Frisco — that doubled yields and beat back rust. The work seeded a web of seed, mill, and supply businesses across the region before the station closed in 1972.