Bryan Museum opens in Galveston, features American West

For about 40 years Bryan and his wife, Mary Jon Bryan, amassed more Old West artifacts than they could squeeze into their homes in River Oaks, West Texas and Colorado — rare documents, weapons, saddles and spurs, uniforms, fine art, religious art and books.

The Houston Chronicle (http://bit.ly/1J6nvQDZ ) reports the new Bryan Museum, which opened Friday, holds that vast array of 70,000 objects.

Reputed to be the largest and most significant of its kind, the collection traces the development of the American West across 2,500 years of civilization.

Bryan's great-great-great grandfather, Moses Austin, founded the American lead industry and initiated the Anglo colonization of Texas.

Houston's Ima Hogg was so besotted with early American decorative art she converted the interior of her Bayou Bend estate into a museum-like space while she inhabited it.

"A real collector knows his subject really well . and will put at risk most of what he has if it comes to that to build his collection," Bryan said.

Pirates and native Americans lived there, and generations of immigrants landed there when it was the Ellis Island of the South.

He's mindful of the troubles faced by his friend John Nau III, a major collector and Civil War expert who committed $16 million to the recently scuttled Nau Center for Texas Cultural Heritage in downtown Houston, but Bryan sounded confident he'd find support from other descendants of the "Old Three Hundred" settlers his great-great uncle led to Texas.

Before founding Torch, he worked more than a decade as an investment banker specializing in oil and gas for J.P. Morgan in New York.

Rare documents are his collection's strong point, including the only known copy of the Mina Proclamation of 1817 and a broadside with William Barret Travis' poetic last plea from the Alamo.

A research library, rare document storage, a space for rotating exhibits and a Texas Masters art gallery with works by Frank Reaugh, Jose Arpa, Robert Onderdonk, Julian Onderdonk, Elizabet Ney and others fill the upstairs.

School tours will begin in the basement, where a papier-mâché octopus sprawls across the low ceiling and an interactive pirate cave beckons.