Five Generations at the Stagecoach Inn: A Ruin at the Intersection of Historic Migration(s) in D’Hanis, TX

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Stagecoach Inn in D’Hanis, Texas, sits at the intersection of multiple migrations and acts of place making in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Texas. The limestone and sandstone ruin, obscured by brush from the closest gravel road, was once the most prominent and visible marker of a small Alsatian settlement on the Texas “frontier.” An inn is built to accommodate movement—the stagecoach line brought a steady stream of travelers during the mid-nineteenth century—but beyond those transitory passings-through were the families that resided in the house, the structure as both dwelling and home. In this paper, I trace five generations of residents at the inn across several intersecting migrations: Alsatian and German immigration to Texas, the violent displacements of settler colonialism, the forced migration of enslavement, and migration from Mexico amid the Mexican Revolution. Using 3D photogrammetry and architectural drawings, I examine the material (and now digitized) remains of the structure and the choices that shaped it through time. Looking outward from its walls, I question how people mark the space-time of migration, past and present, on the built landscape and what that means for a community-based archaeology of place and migration in the present.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36316.0