UTPB regents approve measure to build replica of Stonehenge

By David J. Lee
Odessa American

UTPB officials expect to have surveyors on campus today to begin laying out a site on which to erect a replica of Stonehenge.
The University of Texas System Board of Regents approved a measure Thursday allowing construction of a Stonehenge reproduction at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin.
“Then the next step is to pour the foundations; then it’ll be two weeks before we move any of the stones,” Permian Basin Stonehenge coordinator Dick Gillham said.
UTPB President David Watts, who was in Austin for the regents’ meeting, said he believes the replica will have a positive impact.
“It means our art students in particular — our three-dimensional art students — will be able to not just look at pictures of a monumental three-dimensional art product, but go see one and experience it,” he said. “That’ll be a real advantage to them.”
Watts said the monument would be a memory for UTPB students.
“Students who go to UTPB will be able to remember the university,” he said. “It’ll be an object they remember and come back to and recall.”
Watts also said those already visiting nearby museums will have something else to see.
“It means that schoolchildren from all over West Texas, as they make field trips to the Presidential Museum and the Ellen Noël Art Museum, will add the University of Texas of the Permian Basin campus to their list,” Watts said.
“Their teachers will talk to them about the history of Stonehenge and what purposes Stonehenge served — the astronomical purposes it served — as well as understanding something about European history,” he said.
Gillham said he anticipates completion of the project by the end of June.
Watts said he expects a warm welcome for the stone replica at UTPB.
“It’ll have a tremendous, a very positive impact on the university,” Watts said. “It’ll create a little more of that campus feel with an object such as Stonehenge on campus.”