Heart of the Hills Heritage Center: the flood exhibit isn’t ready. It won’t be for 5 to 10 years. That’s exactly right.

Angela Kennedy made a decision after the July 4, 2025, flood that most institutions would have made differently.

The Heart of the Hills Heritage Center would not rush to open a flood exhibit.

The center received a specialized Rebuild Kerr grant from the Community Foundation to build a comprehensive archive of both the 2025 and 2026 floods — oral histories, photographs, digital media, physical artifacts recovered from flood zones. The archive is being built. The exhibit will come later. How much later depends on when the community is ready.

“We had talked about potentially postponing the opening after the July 4th flood,” Kennedy said Friday on Lead Live’s Nonprofit Week, “but we really wanted to push forward and push through because we knew our community needed something to look forward to.”

The exhibit itself, she said, will arrive in five to ten years — when the distance between the event and its presentation is large enough to allow for genuine reflection rather than raw grief. In the meantime, the center is hosting “story circles” — structured community conversations that help residents process what happened in their own words, on their own timeline, creating the archive that will eventually become the exhibit.

“It is our story through our eyes, what happened, how we responded,” Kennedy said, “so that generations to come can know that history, learn from that history — and it is here in our community and controlled by our community.”

That last phrase is the center’s thesis. Kennedy, who has led the Heritage Center since 2022, made the case Friday for local history not as nostalgia but as civic infrastructure. The consequences of past decisions, she said, are still being lived with today — including decisions about land use that directly explain why older sections of Kerrville suffer such severe runoff and flash flooding. Decades of heavy sheep and goat grazing stripped the land. Early municipal layout choices concentrated water in predictable places. The history explains the hydrology.

The center broke ground this week on a new immersive theater space — funded by private donations from a history-minded local resident and film production sponsors — that will show short films on Kerrville’s history. A separate music exhibit, previously temporary, is being transformed into a professionally designed interactive room featuring a dedicated listening station for Kerrville’s legendary musical heritage, including the Kerrville Folk Festival.

The center also explored Kerrville’s history as a medical destination for tuberculosis patients — a chapter that shaped the modern city. The search for clean, dry air brought the H.E. Butt family and the Eastland family to Kerrville, brought Father Henry Kemper who established Notre Dame School and Our Lady of Guadalupe, and brought Jimmie Rodgers — the Father of Country Music — who sought relief from the disease that would eventually kill him in 1933.

The upcoming Jimmie Rodgers Tribute Concert on Saturday, Sept. 12, at 4 p.m. honors that legacy. The intimate event is hosted in partnership with Kathleen Hudson and the Heritage Music Foundation and features Terri Hendrix and Lloyd Maines. Tickets are $50 with extremely limited seating.

The center needs volunteers to staff its admission desk so Kennedy can shift her focus from daily reception duties to community outreach. Board member Marcus Goodyear — who also appeared on Lead Live Friday representing the H.E. Butt Foundation — is among the board members currently taking desk shifts.

Heart of the Hills Heritage Center: hhheritagecenter.org. Jimmie Rodgers Tribute: Sept. 12, 4 p.m., $50. Volunteer inquiries: akennedy@hhheritagecenter.org.