Museum Information

Museum Information is where you'll find lots of information about our Buildings and what we have in them, as well as how we got started. In case you missed out Home Page, we wanted to publish again our "History" of 3 Bostons Museum.

This all started probably back in the '70s when we put on a town meeting for the State of Texas, which the governor of each state asked each county-seat town to have a town meeting. And we did that in 1977, for the bicentennial of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. It was the 200th year. And we did that and had a large turnout, over 200 people. The theme of that meeting was the 3 Bostons. And that sort of became the theme of the town after that. Several years went past before anyone mentioned a museum. Some different people had tried to find funding and a place for a museum, and a lot of effort was put into it, but it never came to fruition.

Another group, I don't remember the name of the group, got together, and about 10 years later, bein' the early '90s, I guess, and tried an effort to have a museum at the old jail over here. The courthouse was still there at the time, but the jail was not being used. They worked on that and tried to get funding for that and still never accomplished anything. Not that they didn't try, it just didn't happen.

Probably several years after that, there was more attention given to a museum, and same outcome. And I was involved with some of those. My wife passed away in 2014, and I had to stay busy doing something, so that's really when I put most effort into trying to get a museum for New Boston. In 2015 we put together some plans and we knew we were gonna need funding, and I approached the city council with what we needed to do to get funding for a museum and a place for a museum or building, which we were thinking about the old building next to Maria's Restaurant.

But the city council turned that down and decided not to do that. I knew that we had a lot of money in the hotel/motel tax account, so I asked them about that and I was again turned down for the amount that we were gonna need to remodel the building that I just mentioned. Finally, I talked to some people about the hotel/motel tax money because it's supposed to be spent each year attracting tourism to New Boston. After I talked with them they decided to go ahead and support it.

While that was happening, I had a friend in Dallas that graduated from here in 1964, I believe. He was the president of SMU. I went to him with the idea of getting some help from some of the ones that were alumni of New Boston back early or anytime, really. And he was excited about that because it was his hometown. And he met quarterly with a group of people from New Boston, in the Dallas area every quarter. And he brought it to them. And there was an individual in that group that graduated here in 1951 by the name of M.A. Hart, who was in Westport and also a partner with Ross Perot in the EDS systems in Dallas in the '80s. And he shared the program to them and they were very interested.

And while I was in Dallas, I went to the Perot Foundation and talked to them about it. And they were very supportive. And also I had pictures of some of the old buildings in town that he had not seen and didn't know existed. And that created more interest for him. And they said they would support us. A month or two later we began to get funds from Dallas! We called it our Dallas Connection. Ross Perot donated money. M. A. Hart donated money. Truman Arnold donated money and all members of their group out there in Dallas, which is probably 15 or 18, all of those donated. We used that for inventory or artifacts in the museum. And that's the way we got started with it and it took about two years to build, and we had a grand opening June the 1st, 2018. And the rest is history......

DeWayne Hardage