When Jamie Simmons graduated from Ouachita Baptist University, she was looking for a career in history research. Little did she know her destiny would lie so close to home.
"Once I decided history was my field, I got very lucky to find a job right out of college where I wanted to work," Jamie said, recalling how she started out at Texarkana Museum 0f Regional History in 1990 as an intern. "Katie Caver was the director of the Museum then, and she was a great mentor. Since the founding of it in 1971, she worked to build it up."
That internship turned into the curator position, which Jamie filled when Jeanette Winters retired in 1992. Jamie was trained in every aspect of museum work before taking on the role.
"What a curator does is tell a story, and to do that you collect items and images that tell the story most effectively. You have to sift through it all," she said. "When you curate a house, you have to set the house up to tell the family story."
In the case of the Ace of Clubs House on Pine Street, telling the family story was relatively easy, considering the last private owner, Olivia Moore, donated everything inside the house along with it. The antique desk was still full of family papers, and the master bedroom and dressing room were full of shoes - approximately 500 pairs - mostly from Neiman Marcus. A lot of the shoes are laid out on the bedroom floor and furniture for display.
The home was built in 1885 by James Harrison Draughon, an early community builder. Just two years later, he sold the property to the W.L. and Dora Dunn Whitaker, friends of railroad magnate Jay Gould. They, in turn, sold it to Henry Moore in 1894 when they fell on hard times. The family owned the house until Olivia, then in her late 70s, donated the property to the Texarkana Museum Systems in 1985.
"Legend says that Draughon won the money to build the house in a poker game and built it in this shape because the Ace of Clubs was his winning card," Jamie said. "We have no way to prove, or disprove, the story. It's a great story, so we can't not share it."
Jamie said that you must know your subjects well, because the public regards the curator as the expert.
"It's a much heavier responsibility than I anticipated," she said. "It's important to have the facts right, because people believe everything you say. There is a level of trust the public places on you, and it's different from other jobs."
Jamie trains all volunteer tour guides to respect that trust and know the facts.
"History has its ups and downs," she said. "History was made by humans, and humans are fallible. I'm not a fan of presenting historical figures as saints. You can't disconnect the human element."
Another prime piece of property, the P.J. Ahern Home on the Arkansas side, was donated by the Ahern family in 2005 and is currently used as a living history museum. Exhibits and cultural programs are held there, generally on the 4th Saturday of each month. The property is also available for rent as a venue for small weddings, meetings and events.
Both homes are on the National Register of Historical Places and items inside them have been carefully catalogued and staged to tell their stories. Tours are available at both locations. For more information, the website is TexarkanaMuseum.org.
Along with curating, preservation of the properties and items are of utmost importance. Accordingly, the Ace of Clubs House is in need of work to repair moisture damage that has left paint peeling and wallpaper literally falling off the walls. Fundraisers are held throughout the year to help with annual maintenance, but more is needed to fund the work.
When she isn't busy hosting a program or giving tours, Jamie's time is filled with research and archiving local happenings that will become future history. Jamie cites Caver's project of recording interviews with older residents regarding what they remember about growing up in the area.
"The oral history of our area - a firsthand account - is something you just can't duplicate," she said. "People often overlook a lot of history because textbooks focus on prominent people of the community."
A new program coming in March 2020, "Community Scrapbook," will help fill in those gaps in history for future generations. "The public is invited to make their own scrapbook page, or pages, that tell their family story in our community," she said. "They can then submit those pages to the community scrapbook at the museum. It will be an ongoing program."
When not staging these historical homes to tell their stories, Jamie can be found telling her own story at home, appropriately, in the Garrison-McLain home on Pecan Street in the Quality Hill District. And who better to preserve this home, which is also on the National Register of Historic Places, than a museum curator with 30 years of experience?