Old Spanish Trail 

The U.S. South and U.S. and Mexico Border Region 

On December 26, 1930, the managing director of the Old Spanish Trail (OST), Harral Ayres, sent correspondence to C.H. Michaels, the Nogales Chamber of Commerce Secretary from the Gunter Hotel, the trail’s headquarters in San Antonio. After a failed
attempt to retrieve adequate historical information from the Chamber of Commerce’s Secretary, Ayres insisted that “a large travel movement can be brought down to the Old Spanish Trail if the old historical works can be properly portrayed…We get many letters of inquiry, and it is the old history the people are lured by.”

The project proposal examines the physical evolution and development patterns of OST as a source and methodological proposition. The research is driven and inspired by the science of odology described in Roads Belong to the Landscape by J.B. Jackson. Odology is the “study of roads or journeys and, by extension, the study of streets and superhighways and trails and paths, how they are used, where they lead, and how they
come into existence. Odology is part geography, part planning, and part engineering – engineering as in construction, and unhappily as in social engineering as well.”