Those Places Thursday: Sometimes It's NOT Online

A while back, my friend and fellow librarian Natalie posted this picture of her mother on Facebook, and asked for help finding the location. She wrote, "This is a picture of my mother when she was 3 years old in 1939. The back of the photo says she's at Mrs. Bell's in Glen Rose, Texas. Does anyone recognize this place?" Natalie tagged me, since Glen Rose is close both to where I live and where I worked (Tarleton State University's library in Stephenville).

photo courtesy Natalie Hunt Morgan

The first thing I did was search the 1940 Census in my university's HeritageQuest database - available at any library that has TexShare databases.  I looked for the last name Bell in Glen Rose:

Sure enough, a James M. Bell and his wife Clyde E. Bell were shown as owners/partners/operators of a tourist camp within the Glen Rose city limits of the time, and had been in the same house in 1935 (click on the image below to make it larger).  This fit with the information Natalie had provided - and the buildings in the background looked like they could have been part of a camp or motel.

However, Google searches on "Glen Rose" and "Bell," the latter combined with "tourist," "camp," etc. weren't turning up anything.  Nor was I having any luck with any of my university library's newspaper databases, nor with the Portal to Texas History.

Then I remembered that we had a few books on Somerville County history in our Local History collection, in the Special Collections Suite on the lower level of the Dick Smith Library.  In a book called Somerville: Story of a Texas County, by W. C. Nunn, published in 1975, the name Jim Bell appeared in the index . On page 110, the book had this to say:

"Just around the bend from Glen Lake Camp, Jim Bell opened Bell's Park some years ago and operated it until 1962 when he sold the area to J. D. Spinks. Spinks then began maintaining not only his home there but an office and seven rental units for tourists. The front of the camp was adorned by a star of native stone in which bluebonnets were planted."

The Glen Lake Camp still exists in Glen Rose, so I knew approximately where this was.  The passage from the book gave me another clue.  A Google search on Spinks brought up a July 2018 article on the Spinks and Green Garage and Auto business, at 1416 NE Barnard Street in Glen Rose.  When I found that on Google Maps and started moving down Barnard Street (using Google Maps Street View) towards the Glen Lake Camp - there was the star-shaped planter!  Here's a photo I took in November 2019:

And here are the 1939 and 2019 photographs together, Dear Photograph style, lined up as best I could given the glare on my smartphone:

The house in the background appears to be the original (just with a screened-in porch), as does the brick wall around it, although the urns are gone.

© Amanda Pape - 2019 - e-mail me!