Rothgaber Travels: Hidalgo Pumphouse Museum 12/28/09

Yesterday, we went to the Hidalgo Pumphouse Museum. I was built around the turn of the century and was instrumental in the development of the agriculture here in the Rio Grande Valley. The little tour we took was given by the man whose father was the first pumphouse master and then he succeeded his father. The pumphouse would extract water from the Rio Grande River and pump it to the towns and also to the crops via irrigation ditches. In 1933 there was a huge hurricane and the river flooded and when it declined, there was a new course for the river. In some places Mexico lost land and the US gained land and in other place the reverse was true. After that huge hurricane and its devestation, they started building dams along the river so there could no longer be such a change in course for the river.

These are outside views of the old pumphouse (There is now an electric pumphouse down stream which does the job the old pumphouse used to do) Originally, the pumphouse created the steam from burning mesquite, then it was adapted to burning natural gas.

There are beautiful grounds surrounding the pumphouse which are one of the 9 national birding sites in the Rio Grande Valley.

These are views looking toward the border with Mexico which show some of your tax dollars at work.... Yes, those are segments of the border wall recently constructed. If you klick on the photo below you can see some places where it is much taller than in other places. The tall places are where there isn't much of a drop-off on the Mexico side due to a road or such so they made the fence taller. In the places where the wall is shorter, it is because it sits at the edge of the dyke and there is a large drop on the Mexican side.

Now the problem is the wall is not continuous. Gates were to be installed where the breaks are in the wall, but we were told the Obama adminstration has cut the funding so we now have partial walls along the border with gaps!

Above is a photo of Nada in front of the wall.

I just loved these blue flowers.... I have to find out what they are since blue is such a hard color to produce in flowers.

These flowers were so unique with the yellowish centers and orange edges....

A border patrol in one of the gaps...

When we were walking outside, I heard the buzz of hummingbirds by my ear. Apparently they were attracted to my red jacket. In the photo above, Doug is looking at one of the hummers sitting in the tree. There were several hummer feeders in the trees and there was hummer warfare going on as one male was trying to guard all the feeders.

The view above is of the channel they dug in 1933 after that big hurricane move the Rio Grande a 1/4 mile south. They dug this channel to bring the water to the pumphouse so they could continue to pump water to the towns and agricultural fields. The view is looking toward Reynosa, Mexico where you can see buildings.

The rest of these views are inside the pumphouse. The city of Hidalgo decorates the inside at Christmas with Snow Village as part of the Hidalgo Festival of Lights (see our previous post of the Christmas Lights if you haven't already)

The following photos are looking down on the model train layout. The smell brought back memories of our train layout and made me think of all "the smells of Christmas" that we take for granted.