Ancient Web: Texas Water Towers Made Roadside Infrastructure Worth Stopping For

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A water tower is one of those things most people notice only when it has the town's name painted on it and they need to know where the hell they are.

Visit Texas Water Towers

TexasWaterTowers.com gives them considerably more attention than that.

The site is a photographic archive of towers around Texas, organized town by town and mixed with short bits of local geography and history. Pages for places such as Galveston, Round Rock, Hutto, Temple, Manor, and Sealy pair photographs with just enough context to turn the tower into part of the town rather than an isolated object.

Infrastructure becomes a travel collection

The Temple page is a good example of what makes the archive useful.

It does not just show finished towers. One set of photographs documents a new tower while it was still under construction in April 2007, with workers visible inside the tank before the top had been installed.

Elsewhere the site wanders into related collections: Texas wall art, postcards, toys, dolls, books, records, a 1928 Model A, and a 1964 Corvette.

That drift is pure personal web.

A modern niche site would probably insist on staying "on brand." A personal homepage can begin with water towers and then quietly admit that the people behind it also collect postcards and children's books.

The photographs are credited to Kay, and the pages preserve a road-trip rhythm: town name, county, a location note, a little history, then the structure itself.

There is no attempt to make municipal water infrastructure glamorous.

That is what makes it good.

A tower that thousands of drivers pass without thinking can become historically useful once someone photographs it before repainting, replacement, demolition, or redevelopment changes the scene.

Texas has a lot of sky.

Apparently it also has enough water towers to justify an entire website.

Return to Texas Water Towers

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.