City of College Station Blog

By Colin Killian, Public Communications Director

In this week’s episode of “What’s Up, College Station?” Grace Hallowell, Historical Records Archivist Kimberly McNally, and Chief of Staff Ross Brady discuss the City’s fabulous new pictorial history book to be unveiled at a special celebration event on May 19 at 6 p.m. at the College Station Visitor Center.   

The commemorative coffee table book features rare, remarkable images of our community’s rich history. Copies will be available for purchase.

 The “What’s Up, College Station?” podcast is available weekly via Podbean, iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple, and Amazon/Audible. Please subscribe, rate, and recommend!

If you have a suggestion for a future topic or interview, email me at ckillian@cstx.gov.

TRANSCRIPT

Grace Hallowell:

What’s up, College Station? I’m Grace Hallowell, and today we have a very special episode of What’s Up, College Station? My guests are Ross Brady, our chief of staff, and Kimberly McNally, the historical archivist at the City of College Station.

We have a special project that we’ve been keeping a secret for what feels like ages now, and I’m so excited that we get to finally share things about it. But we have been working on a history book for the City of College Station for a little over a year now. Ross, let’s kind of talk about what led to this project. I know we’ve done similar things in the past, but this one is very different from the previous editions.

Ross Brady:

Two years ago, the city celebrated its 85th anniversary in 2023, and for that event, we installed a history wall in City Hall across 140 feet of wall space. And so that kind of kicked things off. The council expressed interest in building on that momentum and doing an updated history book. The city’s done two in the past, so one by Deborah Lynn Balliew in 1988 and one by Tim Gregg in 2019. They wanted to update the book and gave us two missions.

Bob Brick, Linda Harvell, Dennis Maloney, and William Wright were the council subcommittee. Their goals for us were to create an engaging, captivating, and interesting book that picked up where the other books left off, and then took the history book to the modern day. In working on the history wall, we realized that we had a lot of great archival images in Project HOLD. I think Kimmy can probably touch on that, but that’s what launched us into deciding to do a pictorial history book, which is what we’ve done. So it is a coffee table book style with really great imagery from the past and present. And Kimmy, do you want to talk about some of the past imagery we have there?

Kimberly McNally:

Project HOLD is the city’s archival database, where you can find old information and images we have scanned. It’s all publicly accessible, and you can search for whatever topics interest you. So for the purposes of this book, we focused a lot on some images that spoke to the community and used Project HOLD to find more images and information to support the history of those images. All of that is available through the City of College Station website. And we also did some additional research outside of that, using local newspapers and other historical sites that we could find.

Ross Brady:

And over time, I’m not sure how long Project HOLD has been around, over 10 years.

Kimberly McNally:

I think it’s more like 25.

Ross Brady:

Over time, people have been so generous with the images that we have that we have a pretty good-sized archive there. And so a real goal in this book was to showcase imagery that isn’t the images that everybody has seen of College Station, because there are a few of those. We’ve all seen some of the same photos over and over. And so we really wanted to do new stories, new photos that haven’t been there, and photos that tell a story, which I think we’ve really done in some great ways. And one thing we wanted to do was, again, since this book was meant to pick up where the old books left off and take it to the present day, we have a lot of then and now imagery.

Things that were in College Station in 1938 when the city was founded, or earlier in the fifties, sixties, so on. And then how those things look today, or something like that. And the modern-day photography is beautiful. Our folks did a great job with that. While the imagery is great, it is not just a picture book. When we were doing this book, the goal was to imagine that your cousin, who had never been to College Station, was coming to visit the city. They were in your house, and this book was on the coffee table. Its cover was so interesting that they couldn’t help but pick it up, open to any page in the book, look at beautiful imagery, and find some interesting information about the city. And I think we’ve done that, too. All of the captions in the book are short enough to be readable, but are informative and interesting enough to make you want to read, and you’ll come away learning something about the history of the city.

Grace Hallowell:

And this process, while we were in Project HOLD, looking at these images, we would find one that we would be like, “We know there’s a story to this. This is a very interesting image. What is the story?” So we would dig a little deeper. Once we found the story, we incorporated that. And it was a fun project for me because I am not a College Station native, so I feel like I’ve learned a lot from the history wall and other historical projects we’ve worked on here. I’m a visual learner, so seeing these photos and seeing the progression of things with the then and now is very fascinating to me. I love history, and I have a greater appreciation for College Station after working on this project.

Ross Brady:

It is great just to be able to put stories to some of the names you know around the city, whether it’s a street name, a building on campus, or anything like that. You’ll start to see through this book and learn who those people were. And that’s really cool, adding that personal element to the history of College Station.

Grace Hallowell:

Because we are finally finished with the book—it feels like we’ve been working on this forever—we are going to celebrate it with a book launch party. Let’s talk a little bit about what this event entails.

Ross Brady:

We are launching the book on May 19 at 6 p.m. at 1207 Texas Avenue, College Station’s Visitor Center. It’s going to be a great event. So we have a speaker lined up. We will be debuting the book, so nobody will have seen the cover before this event. And two things that I’m excited about. One, a couple of restaurants are featured in the book just because they have been in the community for a long time, or something significant happened there, or their architecture is significant. And so we reached out to those restaurants to see if they’re interested in providing catering. And some of them have been. So we’ll be featuring local restaurants as the caterers there.

Also, we invite people to bring images from any point in College Station’s history to the event. And we’ll have a wall where you can pin them up with clothespins so that the images won’t be damaged. You’ll be able to take it back home with you at the end of the night. But it’ll be there to create a dialogue. Since the book is about sharing stories and images, having people bring in their photos will also help with that. And it’s a cool way to share.

Grace Hallowell:

That’s a unique way to share history, but that’s kind of what community is all about: sharing different stories from the people in your area. So 6 p.m., Monday, May 19, at the 1207 Texas Avenue building. Definitely come out. The book will be available to purchase at this event, correct?

Ross Brady:

Yes, ma’am. It’s $40 a copy. And we will have plenty of copies there for sale.

Grace Hallowell:

There are plenty of copies for sale. It is a hefty book with a lot of images, so it’s definitely a great value for your money. Thank you so much for joining me today.

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