Brenham, Texas

We went to Brenham today to see the blue bonnets. It is early, but there were a few out. What made the trip interesting for me however was learning a bit more about Brenham and thinking about small town America and what is becoming of it. Brenham has become ice cream parlors and antique shops. But it wasn't always so....

By the time of the American Civil War, Washington County was the most populated area of Texas and Brenham was the county seat. There was a railroad up from Houston and it was for Texas a wealthy and civilized place.

Today it is a good sized country town that was obviously quite wealthy at one time, but a bit faded. I've placed some photographs in the slide show and while I hope they stand up on their own, I feel like I should explain them a bit.

I shot them with an extreme wide angle lens and to keep the perspective from being too distorted I kept the horizon around mid frame and shot a lot of the buildings head on. This tended to put a large expanse of the street in the foreground. The thing that struck me about Brenham today, a beautiful Sunday afternoon, was that there were very few cars and very few people. The pictures look like poorly composed postcards, but to me the empty streets that dominate the foreground are symbolic of the movement to cities that took place in the last century.

I was actually thinking about postcards when I took the photographs. I read an article in the paper this morning about an exhibition of postcards and about how individually they are usually pretty vapid - blue sky, green grass, local landmarks. Just like my photographs. What made the collection being exhibited interesting were the comments people had written on them and the overwhelming sameness and at the same time difference in all of them being posted together.

Click on the slide show to see it more closely. All of the pictures have empty streets, buildings in varying degrees of care, and what was at one time a new and very vibrant town. I wonder what makes one town grow, others shrink, and some to just hold their own?

Oh yes, the picture at the top is an old tyme ice cream parlor. After all, more than anything else these days, Brenham is famous for Blue Bell Ice Cream.