On Mar. 24, 2025 the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum (PPHM), was closed indefinitely to the public due to life, safety and fire concerns. This decision was made by West Texas A&M University President, Dr. Walter V. Wendler following a routine Texas State Fire Marshal inspection on Jan. 14.
This decision was met with pushback from students, alumni and the WT community as a whole. People wrote complaints on Facebook groups, made calls to the university and raised the all-important question, ‘How do we fix it?’ Here is what we know right now.
“We have a timeline on the [WT] website now, and it starts in 2015, the last time a fire marshal came to visit, and they found 10 violations,” Wendler said. “This time, they found 150. I’m the only university president in the state of Texas, public or private, that’s an architect, and I was, for many years, registered and practiced by the state of Texas to protect the health, safety and welfare of the people that use a building, it’s the primary aspect of licensure. And I talked to the fire marshal at length about it, and the three Deputy Fire Marshals for the state of Texas agreed and said, this is an appropriate course of action, given the significance of some of the violations.”
For years the university has found loopholes to the issues facing the museum, but Wendler decided it’s too much now.
“We looked very carefully, over the past 10 years, at things that needed to be done,” Wendler said. And there were always workarounds, ways that you could get past a particular regulation, and so on and so forth. I’ve been in the museum many times. And what’s called pre-existing conditions to health care, they call it in the building business non-conforming issues that don’t conform to current code because the codes keep changing. But when I look at these issues and use my best professional judgment as an architect, slash university president, I said there are too many exceptions that have been made over there.”
Wendler is aware of the backlash he has received from the community due to the PPHM closure and is sticking to what he believes is the right course of action.
“We’ve had a lot of calls and a lot of Facebook commentary; People saying all kinds of things,” Wendler said. “It’s a little unfortunate. Some of it’s childish. And people are asking all kinds of things [such as], ‘Why didn’t he do anything before?’ Well, I’ve tried every year. It’s in the timeline. I’ve come to the place where I recognize that human safety is more important than meeting the demands of some of our population that would like to have the museum stay open under any circumstance.”
Previously on Sep. 17, 2024, President Wendler spoke of a desire to tear down parts of the PPHM and rebuild at a city commissioners meeting. Stating $100 million would be needed to renovate the building as it is and make it compliant with 21st century standards.
“We just need $250 million, and we’ll be all set to go,” Wendler said.
At the moment, there is not a way to obtain the funds needed to either renovate the building as it is or tear it down and rebuild.
“What makes me a little bit nervous is that part of the challenge with this museum, it’s been band-aided,” Wendler said. “In other words, we’ve done these little fixes when we have to and so on. But we’re past the point of where we can do that, and it would be disingenuous of me to say, ‘We can invest X number of dollars to make this portion of the museum open for the time being’, and it be a good investment.”
But all is not lost. State Representative John T. Smithee has proposed a plan to help with the reopening of the PPHM. On Mar. 14, Smithee filed a bill that would, if passed, effectively allow the Texas Historical Commission (THC), to take over the “operation and management of the museum.” By entering into a contract with WT.
“We’ve known problems with the building for a while, and it didn’t happen overnight,” Smithee said. “It was basically a lack of maintenance that occurred over a number of years. And it was really nobody’s fault. There was just never any money in the budget to do anything. So to make a long story short, I’ve been looking for any way possible to keep the museum open and get it back open as quickly as possible. And the only way to do that is get some money. We have had some meetings with the Texas Historical Society, and they have given us the impression that there’s a good possibility they could get an appropriation to do what needs to be done down there.”
Smithee made it clear that the THC views this possibility as a partnership with WT.
“The Historical Commission would like to help,” Smithee said. “They totally want to get the museum open. They want to keep it in Canyon, Texas, and I’m committed to that. So, we’ve been working on several options. The Historical Commission said, ‘We want to own the building, just the building, not the artifacts.’ So, the local society would continue to own the exhibits and the artifacts. So that’s what we’re working on. I mean, it’s been a two-way dialog between the university system and the Historical Commission. The university and the museum are the heart of Canyon and the Texas panhandle. So this has got to be a top priority.”
