Calhoun County Museum

10/15/2026

10/01/2026

10/01/2026

Join us for our 3rd annual Spooky Scavenger Hunt, Halloween night from 6-8 pm.

Hope to see you!

09/29/2026

You cannot dig a hole in the bottom of a bay. The water keeps filling it back in.

That was the problem Texas ran into in 1995, when a French ship named La Belle turned up in the mud of Matagorda Bay, where she had gone down in 1686. The hull was there. The cargo was there. And the bay was sitting on top of all of it.

So the state built a wall around the shipwreck. Two walls, really. A double ring of steel driven down into the floor of the bay, packed sand filled in between them, the whole thing closed in a circle around the wreck. Then the pumps came on and the water went out. It was finished in September 1996.

What that bought was a piece of work almost nobody ever gets to do. Archaeologists climbed down into a dry hole in the middle of Matagorda Bay and dug that wreck the way you would dig a site in a pasture, with trowels and brushes and string lines, standing on the bottom of the sea with the Gulf held back on the other side of a steel wall. They brought up more than a million objects. Bronze cannons. Glass trade beads. Casks, tools, hawk bells. And the ship herself, taken apart timber by numbered timber.

Those timbers went to Texas A&M, where the wood was soaked and then freeze dried, one batch at a time, for the better part of seventeen years. Then they were hauled to Austin and put back together in order. The hull of La Belle has been on permanent display at the Bullock Texas State History Museum ever since, standing up in the light in the middle of the room, out of the mud, out of the water, and out of the dark.

09/23/2026

We have added souvenirs to the gift shop. Come by and check them out!

09/22/2026

Podcast Episode · Beyond the Tombstone · September 16 · 20m