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Texas | Architecture | Museums

El Paso Centennial Museum
El Paso, Texas

Wiggins Road and University Avenue
University of Texas El Paso campus

by Sarah Reveley

El Paso Centennial Museum
Photo courtesy Russell Johnson, 2008

El Paso - El Paso Centennial Museum

This unique museum owes its style to the wife of the Dean, who was reading “Castles in the Air" in the April 1914 issue of National Geographic, and noticed the striking similarities between the rugged landscape of the Asian Kingdom of Bhutan and the new College of Mines and Metallurgy location. There were photographs of buildings with high sloping walls, deep inset windows, red brick friezes, mandalas, and majestic overhangs. Mrs. Worrell eventually convinced officials to use the architecture of the small Himalayan nation as a model for the buildings of the new campus. It was designed to house the most complete mineral collections in the Southwest, an excellent exhibit of Indian pottery, habitat groups of the birds and mammals of West Texas, and a large collection of invertebrate paleontological materials arranged for individual research study.

The museum is located on Wiggins Road and University Avenue at the University of Texas at El Paso campus. http://museum.utep.edu/

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El Paso Hotels

The El Paso Centennial Museum
From "Monuments Commemorating the Centenary of Texas Independence", State of Texas, 1938

Postcard courtesy Sarah Reveley

El Paso TX Memorial Museum aereo view postcard

Postcard courtesy Sarah Reveley

© Sarah Reveley

Author's Note: As you continue along the Centennial trail, it is pretty obvious that my best descriptions are the ones of the museums I have seen myself. So, if you have been to any of these, please tell us about it! Send your description to Sarah Reveley