A Cross Along the Road

Someone always takes the time to make a roadside memorial. Historian Emma Beard charts the places, shifting regulations, TXDOT policies, and communities shaping the appearance of memorials on the edge of our highly regulated and controlled Texas byways.

Historian Emma Beard has been working with the Texas Department of Transportation around roadside memorials, partly because as Texas has been changing, the visibility of roadside memorials has become a symbol of larger cultural and demographic trends.  In this presentation, Emma Beard will discuss the recent history of roadside-memorial specific policies, a growing awareness on TXDOT’s part of the importance of these community markers, and a debate regarding the proper relationship highway building and maintenance workers should adopt toward these sites of memory in busy and possibly uncaring landscape. Beard will discuss the importance of a variety of history and geography-based tools to understand and grapple with the changing scale of memorials in Texas.