I got to spend Sunday afternoon with members of the San Antonio Living History Association, who reenacted the historic battle of the Alamo and showed onlookers what life was like 177 years ago.

Related: A review of the Sigma 17-70mm lens for videographers

This was pure heaven for history buffs.

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Another day, another unflinching news story by Scott Huddleston about the Alamo and its troubled caretaker, the Daughters of the Republic of Texas.

Check out how Scott has carved out a unique beat by aggressively covering problems at the Shrine of Texas.

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So I was pleasantly surprised by the Alamo Immortal project published by the San Antonio Express-News, which put a creative twist on the old story of the Battle of the Alamo and its 175h anniversary.

The idea was the brainchild of Dean Lockwood, director of news production at the newspaper. A history buff who knew the big anniversary for the Alamo was coming up, Dean started brainstorming a few months ago about new, original ways to cover the event.

“Sad to say, it’s something that can get a little taken for granted in the media,” Dean told me. “It’s something we cover year after year. You know, the same picture — Dawn at the Alamo.

“We could have gone that route and done the obligatory feature and a couple of other little things and everybody would have been fine with that,” he said. But Dean wanted to try something new, and he brainstormed with art director Adrian Alvarez.

One idea they came up with was retelling the story of the Alamo as if the battle were unfolding before the eyes of an intrepid war correspondent.

There were no journalists who covered the actual battle in 1836, so they went with the next best thing — tapping chief copy editor Bob Kolarik to write articles as if he were there.

“I knew he was a pretty good wordsmith,” Dean said. But even Dean was surprised by how seriously Bob took the job. He stuck with the facts and used actual historical quotes, while having fun writing in the long-winded style of newspapers of that era.

“He took it in such a fun kind of direction but authentic as well,” Dean said.

So for 13 days, with the last dispatch running today, Bob wrote about each chapter of the battle. The stories were published on a spadea, a sheet that goes on the outside the front page. The sepia-colored pages looked decades old, as if they had just been unearthed from dusty archives. And they gave readers a front seat to the historic battle.

Today’s story concluded with the final battle in which almost every Alamo defender died. Kolarik wrote about it with colorful flourishes: “Gen. Santa Anna’s attack this morning on Fortress Alamo began long before the cock crowed, when night was as black as a raven’s heart at midnight.”

The articles included Wall Street Journal-style illustrations by graphic designer >Mike Fisher, whose byline was “xylographer from the Staff.” Page designer Scott Stodard, also a history buff, helped design the pages and research the nuggets of information about the Alamo that ran inside the spadea. And the first day of the series featured artistic photos of the Alamo by Express-News photographer Billy Calzada.

The project didn’t end with the print edition. The paper’s website featured a stand-alone Alamo Immortal page featuring historic photos, graphics, and audio of the Alamo story told in the baritone voice of San Antonio news broadcaster Henry Guerra. The recordings had originally aired in the 1970s.

“Very little of this is new, but for a lot of people, it’s new to them,” Dean said, describing the research process. “It was kind of fun cherry picking all the cool stuff. We usually don’t have the excuse to sweep all the piles of historical dust together and do something cool with it.”

Related: How to research a property’s history using Bexar County’s free records search

We often hear how print is dead, or how no one can make any real money on the Internet. But the truth is, both have distinct advantages, and it was great to see them used to full effect in Alamo Immortal. Kolarik’s historic articles were perfect for the printed page. Photo slideshows and audio are one of the strengths of the Web.

I also liked how the Web version did not publish the full dispatches from Kolarik; instead, it posted excerpts and directed readers to the paper for the rest of the story. Not everyone agrees with this approach, but I think it’s OK to give readers an incentive to buy a copy of newspaper, which still generates the bulk of revenue for the Express-News.

Alamo Immortal probably gave the paper a bump in circulation and ad sales. But Dean thinks it’s real value is more intangible — it broke out of the anniversary rut and gave readers something new. This is one of the biggest challenges for newspapers, which enlightens and surprise some days — but can also be as interesting as Aunt Helga’s fruitcake on others.

“It gave people a warm fuzzy feeling about something the Express-News did,” Dean said. “When they think of the Express-News for the next few weeks or months, they’ll at least have that as a little mile marker and say, ‘Hey, they did that cool thing.’

“If we did that five, six, eight times a year, that’s better than … not, you know?”

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Yesterday I mentioned the clash that occurred in 1908 between Adina De Zavala and Clara Driscoll, both members of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, the custodians of the Alamo. Zavala barricaded herself in the Long Barrack to ensure its preservation.

Over the years, members of the nonprofit organization have at times disagreed about how best to preserve the historic shrine, and today, Scott Huddleston wrote a story about the latest rift:

The Daughters of the Republic of Texas have taken the dramatic step of expelling two members who formed their own nonprofit organization and criticized the group that cares for the Alamo.

In a news release, the DRT said a “distracting and negative event” has come to an end, allowing the lineage group to refocus on care of the shrine and other sites across the state.

It remains to be seen whether the DRT and the organization formed by the ousted members, Erin Bowman and Dianne MacDiarmid, will coexist peacefully, as each seeks to promote the Alamo’s best interests. Bowman and MacDiarmid both declined to comment Monday.

“We’re trying to decide where we’re going from here,” Bowman said.

You can check out Scott’s original story about the controversy here. “I think the split has been a long time coming,” Bowman said in July.

(Photo credit: Rafael Resendiz)

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One of the cool features of Bexar County’s digital archive is that you can do crazy keyword searches for people like “David Crockett” and other historic figures in San Antonio to discover deeds and other public records filed in their name. Some of these records document important events in the city’s history.

Out of curiosity, I ran a search for “Daughters of the Republic of Texas” and sorted the results by date to look for deeds filed in 1905, when the nonprofit group became the custodians of the Alamo.

I found this deed describing how the Daughters, with the financial help of Texas lawmakers and wealthy benefactor Clara Driscoll, had paid $75,000 to the merchants who owned the Long Barrack on the Alamo grounds. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $1.8 million in today’s dollars.

The deed says the Daughters were incorporated for “the patriotic purpose of acquiring historic ground and perpetuating the memory and spirit of the men and women who achieved and maintained the independence of Texas and cherishing and preserving the unity of Texas.” The deed describes how the Daughters released the property to the state of Texas. The state owns the Alamo; the Daughters take care of it.

If you’re a history buff, you could enjoy hours of nerdy fun finding these kinds of primary documents.

Notice how this record is just a piece of the story. Clara Driscoll helped save the Alamo’s Long Barrack by opening her pocketbook, so her name is in the deed. But there’s no mention of Adina De Zavala, who persuaded Driscoll to join the cause of preserving the Alamo, and later famously clashed with Driscoll about what to do with it.

For tips about looking up historical records on the county’s Web site, there’s a FAQ page that offers search tips, and I blogged here about some pointers.

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Since the sale of the Native Texan license plates began in 2003, the DRT has collected $22 per plate. Of the $213,452.30 it reported spending in license plate proceeds from early 2005 through August 2008, just over $37,000 — 17 percent — supported the Alamo, according to records from the governor’s office …

A lesser-known site, the French Legation Museum, an 1841 house near downtown Austin, drew the largest share of license plate funds — $50,004.89. And the DRT spent $18,214.46 on its Republic of Texas Museum, also in Austin.

I hadn’t known the DRT got a cut of license-plate sales so it was interesting to see how the money is being spent. Where the money goes is important — a rift is growing between DRT members who disagree about fundraising efforts to maintain and protect the Texas shrine.

Somehow, “Remember the French Legation Museum!” doesn’t quite roll off the tongue in the heat of battle like “Remember the Alamo!”

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Express-News Reporter Scott Huddleston, who’s been covering the turmoil within the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, wrote a follow-up story about a discussion to prohibit the nonprofit’s employees from talking to the media — even after the employees no longer work for the group:

Read more: How much did it cost to save the Alamo?

The women who run the Alamo deny that they’re trying to muzzle anyone.

But the Daughters of the Republic of Texas have mulled a plan to deter Alamo employees from talking to the media, even after they’ve moved on.

Patti Atkins, DRT president-general, said the group is trying to stop a flow of “misinformation.”

“We have no intention of putting a gag order on anybody,” Atkins said.

According to minutes of an Aug. 12 meeting, the DRT’s Alamo Committee sent a proposed policy on media access to a lawyer for review. It would require new Alamo employees to acknowledge that when their employment ended, they’d be forbidden from giving interviews or making any “representations of the Alamo.”

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