Pittsburg by Candlelight
PITTSBURG – There’s a three-hour window to travel a trail leading into a script turning places to chapters of the town story. A six-member executive committee, the business-district merchants, homeowners, docents and students getting hands-on experience in community service began working on the 6 to 9 p.m. December 8 event last spring.
This is Pittsburg measured through new eyes looking from the outside in.
“We’re adventurers,” said Terre Wallis, half of the under-aged retiree Bob and Terre duo landing at a home on the lake here two years ago. “We like small-town festivals and roadside museum stops.”
When she visited city hall, what began as the thought of making sure school students knew the town story she was learning morphed into “Pittsburg by Candlelight,” a Christmas walking tour.
For adults only, there’s the “Afterglow” event at the downtown culinary school, social time for debriefing over Los Pinos Wines, a selection of Chophouse on the Bankhead Chef Emon’s horderves and Efurd Orchards Custom Desserts.
Christmas carolers will be singing in the downtown pocket park and three of seven tour stops including three historic homes, two museums, a turn-of-the 20th century church and a downtown building transfromed to a gallery for the evening.
“The ‘pop-up gallery’s’ about the people who’ve built and continue shaping the town,” Mrs. Wallis said. “It’s about the heritage of a place where families took root and prospered.” It’s a one-time show of photography and personal memorabilia, treasures from the attic.
Downtown merchants offering after-hours discounts are keeping doors open in the first town in Texas to have the whole of its business district listed in the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places.
“If the ghosts of the town’s fathers might return from the 19th century, they would recognize the same business district main street seen today,” said the Texas Historical Commission’s Leslie Wolfenden.
The tour includes the First United Methodist Church where stained glass shipped from Saint Louis has filtered the color of a century of Christmas seasons. The church was completed in 1905. Its nutshelled narrative goes back another half century. The congregation organized in 1857, a year before the opening of the hardware store on Quitman Street.
Docents serving as tour guides will be recounting the legend of an airship said to have flown here in 1902, a year before the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk.
A great niece of town namesake William Harrison Pitts, Carolyn Heath Franks is opening her 1904 Queen Anne Victorian home.
Now converted to the centerpiece of the Farmstead Museum, the Hoffman House built in 1900 is one of the stops for the carolers.
Built in 1913 by prominent businessman John Miller Holman, the Antebellum style home that was the first in town with electric lights is on the tour.
Built for $3,500 in 1896, the 5,100 square feet of the Abernathy House that’s now a vintage wedding venue is featured.
The $25 tickets are available on line at pittsburgtexas.com, at Maybens downtown and at city hall.
East Texas Journal Graphics / Sam Ferguson
