Local resident David Wood has the heart and the hands for bringing history to life.
“I’m very interested in history. In San Angelo where we moved from, I helped save the railway depot that was going to be torn down and turned it into a beautiful museum,” he said. “I worked there for 20 years as a volunteer.”
Wood has also written history papers as well.
“When I came here, I started asking people what’s this town about, where’s what,” Wood added. “There’s got to be history about it.”
His past includes working as a contractor in the 1990s creating models for fire training school projects on the grounds of Goodfellow Air Force Base. Scenarios involved burning buildings, a plane crash and other catastrophes on the grounds. He created a sizable model of the base to train first responders for crowd con- trol, emergency response and more.
At a railroad museum in west Texas, he built five layouts of models with scenery. At one point the local media featured his backyard end-to-end with a miniature train model complete with circus features.
“Just the model by itself is nice, but you surround it with the place where it was located, try to get it as close as possible – a diorama gives it a lot more detail of where it was,” he hinted about his latest projects.
Soon after moving to Burnet County, he decided to chronicle the area’s rich history.
In the spring of 2025, Wood’s son worked as a realtor and sold the ranch off CR 340 where the historic Mormon mill just outside Marble Falls was located.
The landowner welcomed Wood onto the property comprising hundreds of acres. He fished in the pond and toured the property.
He noticed one granite historic monument on the property as well. Wood then collected an original photo of the mill and took images of the site where the mill was located.
The history of the Mormons’ move to the area involved being flooded on the Pedernales River and along Austin waterways. Migrating Mormons then built the mill which was fed by creeks and springs in 1851.
“I spent many hours in the library here (Marble Falls) and in Burnet and up at the courthouse, at both museums and interviewed people from around here,” Wood explained.
He studied the color of the stones and the types of geology on the land.
“I decided to make a diorama to give it more of a feel of what it looked like,” he said. “I have a computer program that I design the building on. It has all different kinds of textures like the metal, the wood, the windows, rock.”
He visited Fort Croghan in Burnet and Falls on the Colorado Museum (FOCM) in Marble Falls to determine if the nonprofit venues would be interested in his dioramas for exhibition.
Eventually, he created three Mormon mill models, one for the landowner and two for the museums.
“We’re real lucky to have two museums who have quite a bit of information in the county on different historical things,” he said. “People know when you say Mormon mill, they think it’s just that road out there.”
In Marble Falls, a street on the route to the ranch is named Mormon Mill Road.
“Most don’t know there were really Mormons that built a mill and what it was about.”
Back in 1861, there were cedar shakes made from split pieces of wood, which was a popular roof top material manufactured at the site.
His method of constructing the dioramas included simple materials such as pink foam, toothpicks, cardboard and even cereal boxes.
Wood’s attention to detail included the illusion of flowing water using a storage wrap- style material with blue and white paint.
The replica included two grinding wheels, one for corn and one for wheat.
“The water was the power for everything. The water powered a drive shaft; the drive shaft was turning. The belts on the drive shaft would run different things,” he said. “There were different kinds of saws for cutting lumber.”
The Mormons made furniture at the location. A desk from the site is featured at Fort Croghan in Burnet.
“The Mormons were only there about three years,” he said. “They ended up leaving, and they sold it to a gentleman named (Noah) Smithwick. He and his nephew ran it.
“There’s tons of history. The mill was ran up into the late 1800s by somebody else. It was partially torn down and it burned in 1901.”
At FOCM, docents have an original cog wheel that slid onto a shaft as well as some of the mill stones from the site.
Wood took about 100 hours to build one of the projects. He compiled the information from 86 different documents to present to the museums as well.
In October, the museums gladly accepted his projects.
“I’d like people to take a little interest in history and learn about what we have around here,” he said.
His next project will involve a model of the railroad depot in Marble Falls and include information about its history in connection with the Texas Capitol as well as a replica of Dead Man’s Hole.
“I just have fun. It takes a lot of time, but I enjoy the history. I enjoy learning things,” Wood said. “There’s a lot more things around here that I want to learn about.”
