ORANGE — H.J. Lutcher Stark and I had this much in common: We were both captivated by the West, old and new.

Stark’s affection was told in the art collection he left behind, now housed in the Stark Museum of Art here. Mine played out first in my childhood, spent north of Boston, after long hours reading about Kit Carson and pioneers and the Oregon Trail.

Stark had the money to collect works by brilliant artists like John James Audubon and Frederic Remington, N.C. Wyeth, W.H. Dunton and Georgia O’Keeffe. I had the money to buy a few books about some of these people and enough gasoline to make it to Orange on Saturday to peruse the Stark collection. I consider myself fortunate for both of those pursuits.

My interest in the Old West was revived twice in the last decade or so — the first time, when I took a graduate course on “The American Frontier”; the second time, when I found myself in Trinidad, Colorado as a consultant for a small newspaper there.

For class, I read “The Oregon Trail” by Francis Parkman, who was at times a frail, 19^th century Bostonian who from a young age appreciated the value of capturing the history of the West even as it was unfolding. His memorable and classic story was told in both magazine pieces and as a single volume, which was based on a two-month trip to the Western Plains and to the Rockies in the late 1840s.

In Trinidad, eight years back, I toured the museum there named for A.R. Mitchell, a town native and painter whose art graced the covers of some 160 “Western pulp magazine covers” from the 1920s to 1940s. What was a portion of the Santa Fe Trail passes by the front of the museum, located in an old store front, today.

Trinidad struggles now but it was once a booming Old West town. Bat Masterson was once town marshal, Wyatt Earp played cards there. At least I was told that. I sat at the table where he played, my host said.

There were sometimes gunfights in the streets, including outside the renovated hotel where I stayed in Trinidad. When I was there, townspeople would tell me that a favorite TV channel offered mostly Western movies and old shows locally. On rare, lucky occasions, some TV script might include mention of Trinidad, which is geographically isolated with fewer than 9,000 people, and the phone lines in town would get busy.

While in Trinidad, I made one weekend excursion to Taos, New Mexico, 117 miles southwest, traveling along Route 160, where I saw antelope bounce over the open ground. At one point, I swore I saw a buffalo herd — couldn’t have been, I thought — but after I returned to Trinidad I was told that Ted Turner owned a ranch along Route 160 and he kept buffalo there.

Stark, too, spent time in Taos — he took annual trips to Santa Fe and Taos — and I can understand that. He had money, loved art and loved the American West. From the 1920s, the family said, he’d envisioned building a museum in Orange to house his collection. He never saw the museum; his widow completed the work a decade after his death.

Taos operates as an artists’ colony and the town — as well as the road there — was breathtaking. I toured the galleries, visited Kit Carson’s home, museum and gravesite, stopped to take in some historic churches, stood on the bridge over the Rio Grande Gorge, a canyon carved out by millions of years of erosion. I had a single day to spend in Taos, but it was worth a lifetime.

All of that was what made my Saturday visit to the Stark Museum of Art precious to me. Orange boasts in a pamphlet that it has “Smalltown charm, World-class culture” and touring the museum, you can sense some of this. I sensed it passing by Dunton’s oil painting of the Ninth Calvary, past Oscar Edmund Berninghaus’ “The Santa Fe Trail” and standing before Remington’s “The Rattlesnake.”

That’s because Stark invested well in selecting and purchasing the pieces and the family was most generous in leaving them for the public’s pleasure. I took my pleasure from this collection Saturday. Lutcher Stark’s gift to his town — to the world, really — completed a connection in interests from that native Texan to this native New Englander. I am grateful.

Why did I wait so long?

It was there for the visiting.

You go visit, too.

Ken Stickney is editor of The Port Arthur News.