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Newspaper/Newsletter/Online |
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Abilene Reporter-News - Sunday, July 11, 1999 |
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Kilgore’s
East Texas Oil Museum
by Pamela Percival
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[excerpt from article]
In the nearby small community of New London,
stop for a vanilla coke and a piece of homemade
buttermilk pie at the London Museum and Tea Room
on Highway 42 across from what is now the West
Rusk school campus. The tea room features an
old-fashioned soda fountain and weekday lunch
specials like chicken and dumplings and roast
beef. If you order from the menu, expect
overly-generous helpings of mayonnaise on almost
anything unless you specify differently.
The tea room was opened several years ago by
volunteers to help finance a small museum
dedicated to the more than 300 people who died
in a cataclysmic explosion at the New London
School in 1937. The museum opened a year ago,
thanks largely to the efforts of volunteer
museum director Mollie Ward.
Ward was 10 years old on March 18, 1937 when,
while sitting on a school bus outside the New
London School, she saw the building explode and
crumble into pieces. The tragedy of the
explosion rocked the community, which because of
the oil boom going on at the time, had the
distinction of being the richest rural school
district in the nation. The explosion, caused by
a natural gas leak in the school’s basement,
also touched people across the world. Sympathy
telegrams poured in, including one from "Adolf
Hitler, German Reichs-Chancellor." His yellowed
telegram is displayed in the museum near an oral
account of the explosion’s
aftermath that was recorded by young newsman
Walter Cronkite who had just been assigned to
the Dallas bureau of UPI news service.
Ward tries to take each set of museum visitors
on a personal tour of the facility, sharing her
extensive historical and personal knowledge. |
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