Sunday, January 29, 2006

New Computer

We have a new (to us) computer. Dave Dunlop who has helped us with computer networking and other geeky stuff brought in an oldish computer with a good graphics card so we can have another place to work on Photoshop stuff.

His company is updating their computers. We got a cast off, which is welcome in the Depot. Thanks to SPEC Inc!

Printer troubles

If you're wondering where the latest Elgin Historical Association newsletter is... it's because we have printer troubles in the Depot. Our Canon S9000 has started printing funny colors in the wrong places. Much troubleshooting and searching of websites has led us to order a new printhead. I resisted the temptation to try to clean our old one as suggested here.

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1003&message=16473176

Then I had problems with registering at PayPal and eBay (where we found a printhead at a good price.) PayPal seems to be tightening up their registration process, which is good for security, but you have to wait for them to send some small amount of money to your bank account before you can use PayPal.

Such are the exciting historical issues being dealt with by your factotum of late.

Sunday, January 22, 2006

The vanquished lumber company

Here's a photo of the lumber yard that burned, called the Barnes Jones Lumber Company when this picture was taken in the 1950s. Posted by Picasa

Saturday, January 21, 2006

The other Elgin

Well, one of them, the big one in Illinois. With the watches. I had noticed earlier that their newspaper is called the Courier and when I was searching for details on the day of the fire I noticed that they, too, had a lumber yard fire. Now they have noted our fire on their blog. So this is a bit of a doppelganger entry.

Downtown Elgin: Fire Destroys Elgin Lumber Company in Elgin, Texas

On the subject of the fire, we looked around in the depot for a picture of the Elgin Lumber Yard, which we didn't have in our 3,000+ Photograph Collection. Francis finally found one in a 1950s EHS yearbook. I still don't know much about the history of this business and would appreciate any pointers. I'll put the picture up when I go to the depot tomorrow. Posted by Picasa

Friday, January 20, 2006

Elgin Depot Museum

This was a lucky snapshot in August 2005. I've done all sorts of odd things to it - in Photoshop and in Picasa. Here's the latest. Posted by Picasa

Why dustpan?

Every Thursday Lucille sweeps up little bits of yellowed old Elgin Courier from the floor after her session of photographing the brittle old newspapers. We joke about how priceless the old Couriers are - sometimes even one square inch with a crucial name or date on it.

Similarly I often pick up little bits of our town's history from visitors to the Elgin Depot Museum, from my reading or from perusing the shelves and boxes and piles of as-yet uncatalogued items. We need a "dustpan" to preserve these fragments of history. So here it is.

We'll also try to keep you informed about what's going on in the Depot, what we need, what we have recently acquired, information about exhibits and maybe even some juicy gossip.

All you thousands of readers out there can send us feedback through this "dustpan" blog also.