Texas Highways, Volume 70, Number 2, February 2023 Page: ATTACHMENT
80 p. : col. ill., mapsView a full description of this periodical.
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99includes Balmorhea, Toyah, Toyahvale, Pecos, Saragosa, and
Pecos-had nearly 2,000 residents, who were predominantly
farmers of Mexican descent. The census from that year showed
63 farms countywide, comprising nearly 900,000 acres and
51,000 head of cattle.
"What drew people to the area was the water," said Pat Bri-
jalba, who lived in Reeves County for 73 years before moving to
Odessa last January.
In Calera, a now-abandoned town about 3 miles west of Bal-
morhea, inhabitants built small huts, or tapias, into the banks
of Toyah Creek. The stream flows northeast of Balmorhea 50
miles west to the Pecos River. Brijalba's great-grandmother
lived in a tapia, and she described a sod roof where the fam-
ily planted vegetables. Brijalba has helped collect the history of
families who lived in Calera as far back as the early 1900s. This
includes a woman named Lupe Renteria Lyles, who described
life in Calera around 1923 as "hard, happy, abundant, and filled
with great people."
Brijalba said life in Calera began to change in the 1940s, when
farming became mechanized and access to water changed.
With the goal of improving the area's old irrigation system, the
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation acquired Phantom Lake Springs, a
spring-fed natural lake that formed outside the mouth of the
limestone Phantom Cave, a privately owned site near Calera.
The Bureau of Reclamation diverted spring water from the cave
into two new canals and reconstructed a dam, furnishing water
to more than 10,000 irrigable acres. Irrigation wells caused the
Phantom Lake Springs flow to decline by such an extent that by
1983, Phantom Lake had all but disappeared, and Calera's sec-
tion of Toyah Creek dried up. But, according to Brijalba, residents
moved away long before then,leaving very little evidence of their
lives behind.
One exception is Calera Chapel, established as a mission in
1902, when a 34-year-old priest from the Netherlands named
Nicolas Brocardus began serving the area. The small adobe and
rock structure was plastered in the 1940s. Decades later, it stood
abandoned, a refuge for bats, cows, and horses. "I always saw
the abandoned church and wondered-when was this church
built, who attended here, what kind of church was it? I thought,
we could probably restore that and people would come see it,"
Brijalba said.
In 2002, Brijalba teamed with Kate Vigneron, his boss at
The Balmorhea News at the time, to restore the chapel. A phi-
lanthropist and entrepreneur who'd moved to the area from
France and opened several local businesses, Vigneron became
the benefactor for the chapel's restoration. Brijalba, along with
other community members and a crew from Fort Davis, went to
work. They removed the old plaster, revealing the original adobe,
mud, and rock, and replastered everything but the exterior back
wall of the church. They broke pieces of concrete from aban-
doned farm canals, mixed cement, and laid it down as a new
floor.Without electricity, Brijalba suggested a skylight.Vigneron
hadheavywooddoorsmadeinMexicotohonortheperiodwhen
the chapel was first built. Woodworking friends in Midland and
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Texas. Department of Transportation. Texas Highways, Volume 70, Number 2, February 2023, periodical, February 2023; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1623752/m1/40/: accessed July 16, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.