East Texas restaurateur loves to collect historic items
His hobby is on display for all to see and discuss.
Spend any time with history buff Bill Starnes, and it is immediately clear he has the collecting bug.
The Gilmer restaurateur surrounds himself with old things, especially photographs and items that relate to the early days of Upshur County and surrounding areas.
But what makes his hobby unusual is that it’s on display for all to see and discuss.
“I didn’t get nerdy until I got older,” he said with a grin, pulling out old Sanborn Maps from the area as examples.
“I enjoyed history, enjoyed hearing the stories,” he said.
His two family restaurants, Hadden’s on the Square and the Walking S Steakhouse, serve as the backdrop for his collection of artifacts that spans decades.
The walls of both establishments are blanketed in images that are conversation starters.
“History’s my thing,” he said. “Anything history, I like it. Other people seem to like it, too. They ask a lot of questions.”
Starnes is not a native of Upshur County.
He grew up in the Grapevine area and moved to East Texas in the 1980s in an effort to leave the rat race of a stressful 9-to-5 career.
Feeling a personal connection to his new home, he immediately immersed himself in the area, learning all he could about its history and people.
When the idea of having a museum in Gilmer was hatched, he got behind it, believing that the area’s rich history was enough to keep the doors open.
Much of his time today centers on whipping up original delicacies for his restaurants, but he still carves out moments to explore forgotten days.
Some of his favorite pastimes include nosing around old cemeteries and picking through piles at garage sales.
“Sometimes I’d go to a garage sale, and there would be old yearbooks for a quarter a piece,” he said, explaining that the books are always a treasure trove of who’s who in a community.
A personal endeavor is helping locate and document lost cemeteries.
“There was a cemetery book published in ’74 that listed only white cemeteries,” he said. “I said, ‘We need to correct that,’ and we did.”
Starnes, who is married with children and grandchildren, enlisted area Boy Scouts to assist in location and identification of the old graveyards.
Pause a few moments to look over his collection, and time seems to melt away.
Almost every spare square inch of his eateries, on walls, shelves and display cases, seems devoted to the past.
Faces captured in some of the old black and white photographs appear lifelike, with crisp details of people at work, rest and play.
Most of the images are copied from a collection of glass negatives donated to the Historic Upshur Museum by the old Hays Studio.
For every object, there seems to be a story.
One might suspect the historian would be somewhat reluctant to part with his possessions, but that’s not necessarily the case.
“Sure, I’d sell — everything’s for sale,” he said, nodding in agreement. “But it would have to be a real special offer.”