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The I-20 Wildlife Preserve and Jenna Welch Nature Study Center

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2013, Rhotenberry Wellen Architects; KDC Associates, landscape architects. 2201 S. Midland Dr.

This 90-acre urban playa, lake, and wetland is sandwiched among the storage areas for pipe and other oilfield equipment between I-20 and the industrial southern edge of Midland. The site was set aside as parkland in the 1960s, but it remained largely a dump for litter until the early twenty-first century, when Midland conservationists Paul Davis Jr. and Elaine Magruder funded a master plan by The Rivers Studio, and a nonprofit was formed to partner with the City of Midland to develop the preserve, composed of a 2,105-foot-long boardwalk, an elevated hawk-watching platform, seven bird blinds, and other installations. The architects also designed a Nature Center (named for Jenna Welch, one of the conservationists who pushed to have the park created in the 1960s and the mother of former first lady Laura Bush), for which funding is being raised (2018).

Writing Credits

Author: 
Gerald Moorhead et al.
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Data

What's Nearby

St. Nicholas Episcopal Church
Marian Blakemore Planetarium
Fredda Durham Turner Children’s Museum
Museum of the Southwest (Fred and Juliette Turner House)
St. Ann’s Catholic Church

Citation

Gerald Moorhead et al., "The I-20 Wildlife Preserve and Jenna Welch Nature Study Center", [Midland, Texas], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/TX-02-MT19.

Print Source

Buildings of Texas

Buildings of Texas: East, North Central, Panhandle and South Plains, and West, Gerald Moorhead and contributors. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019, 461-462.

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