Ima’s gift
Aging site needs to be maintained.
When longtime Chronicle readers hear the word Winedale, they’re likely to think of Leon Hale, our venerable columnist who’s penned many a piece from his Winedale country cabin. But Leon is not the only historic treasure residing in the little Fayette County community.
In the 1960s, Ima Hogg, the daughter of Gov. James Hogg and one of Houston’s most generous philanthropists, donated to the University of Texas at Austin several historic houses and barns on 225 acres at Winedale.
She wanted the site to become a laboratory for UT students and others to explore Texas history and culture.
For a time, it was that, in addition to being home to UT’s successful summer Shakespeare program. Shakespeare survives at Winedale, but as the Chronicle’s Benjamin Wermund reported last week (“Agin gwears on museum, “Page A1, July 7), the grounds and historic structures have deteriorated, and programs have been cut back.
UT seems to have lost interest, and the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, which manages Winedale from Austin, doesn’t have the resources to make necessary repairs and preventive maintenance or promote potential programs. Apparently, it can’t do the necessary fundraising.
“There are other people in the community who are upset about it, and a lot of Houston folks who live around here who knew Miss Ima who are upset about it,” said Jim Ayres, who founded the Shakespeare program and still runs a summer camp for high school students at Winedale.
They have a right to be upset. If UT can’t or won’t maintain the site, use it creatively and promote it, then it has an obligation to find someonewho will.
Possibilities include the Institute of Texan Cultures in San Antonio, the Texas Historical Commission or perhaps another university. (Texas A& M is not far away.)
Wayne Bell, a former UT architecture professor who helped Hogg restore the properties and who ran the center for decades, has suggested that the historical commission acquire the property and showcase it as a complement to the Varner Hogg Plantation in Brazoria County, which already is under historical commission auspices. The two properties together, in Bell’s view, “would illuminate the efforts of Miss Ima.”
Bell recalled that Hogg often used the phrase “carry the thought.” It was, he said, “her way of making things happen through combined positive thoughts.”
Carrying the thought for Winedale means making something happen sooner rather than later.
Otherwise, to borrow a phrase Winedale’s summer Shakespeare students perhaps know, a rural Texas treasure becomes a site “where wasteful Time debateth with decay.”