The Calaboose: African American San Marcos

In 1873 San Marcos built a small stone jail — a calaboose — and for generations it did the grim work of a segregated Texas town's lockup. In the 1990s that same building was reclaimed as the Calaboose African American History Museum, turning a symbol of confinement into a keeper of Black history. This driving tour follows that thread across the neighborhoods where African American San Marcos built its own institutions: the museum in the old jail, the churches and school that anchored the community, and the birthplace claim of Eddie Durham — the pioneering jazz guitarist and arranger who helped invent the electric guitar's role in big-band music and wrote for Count Basie and Glenn Miller. It's a tour about a community that made a life and a culture of its own inside the hard limits of a segregated town.