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Reference · Organization

Texas Historical Commission

The Texas Historical Commission is the Texas state agency for historic preservation. It works with citizens and local organizations to preserve architectural, archeological and cultural landmarks, and it is governed by fifteen citizen members appointed by the governor to staggered six year terms.1 The agency administers the Official Texas Historical Marker Program and the Texas Historic Courthouse Preservation Program, which pays for the restoration of historic county courthouses.23

History

The Legislature created the agency in 1953 as the Texas State Historical Survey Committee, charged with surveying, recording, preserving, restoring and marking all phases of Texas history in cooperation with state, regional and local groups.4 Its first members, eighteen in number, served six year terms.4 The committee could prescribe uniform markers, check the accuracy of marker inscriptions and certify the historical worth of any property the state proposed to buy.4

State law let county judges appoint county historical survey committees, and by 1966 every one of the state’s 254 counties had one.4 In 1964 the committee adopted a policy statement known as RAMPS, for recording, appreciation, marking, preservation and surveying, and set out to erect five thousand official markers in five years, since the state had run no official marking program since the Centennial of 1936. The five thousandth marker was approved on October 27, 1969.4 After 1968 its work widened to the state archeological program, museum services and the National Register of Historic Places in Texas.4

The Legislature renamed the body the Texas Historical Commission in 1973, adding protective powers, a larger leadership role and broader educational duties.14 In later decades it ran grant programs such as the Texas Preservation Trust Fund, oversaw designations including Recorded Texas Historic Landmarks and State Archeological Landmarks, reviewed the effect of construction projects on historic sites and published a newsletter, The Medallion.4

Historical markers

The Handbook of Texas describes the marker program, formed in 1962, as a way to record historic sites in all of the state’s counties, with staff evaluating applications for the State Marker Review Board and drafting inscriptions.4 Markers have commemorated buildings, battle sites, trails, cemeteries and early businesses and schools, as well as towns that no longer exist.4 More than eleven thousand had been erected by 1992.4 The commission today describes markers as one of its most visible programs; eligibility depends on age, significance and architecture, and applicants seek a subject marker, a Historic Texas Cemetery marker or a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark marker.2 How a building’s own inscriptions can be read alongside such plaques is considered in the essay on cornerstones.

Courthouse preservation

The Handbook’s article on county courthouses notes that a law protecting nineteenth century courthouses followed alarm among legislators and citizens at the demolition of old buildings to make way for new ones.5 The commission records that many historic courthouses were lost to fire or demolition from the 1950s through the 1990s, and that the Legislature established the Texas Historic Courthouse Preservation Program in 1999 to reverse the trend.3

The program has three parts: grants for planning and construction of up to $10 million, awarded to eligible counties through a biannual competitive application; review of work on any building that serves or has served as a county courthouse; and a training program begun in 2006 that teaches county facility managers sound maintenance practice.3 The commission reports that the program has assisted 107 historic courthouses with more than $500 million in grants.3 The program’s effects are weighed in What the Preservation Program Changed, and the place of the courthouse within the plan of a county seat is taken up in an essay on the town square.

The commission keeps a table of restored courthouses giving each county’s rededication date and the year its building was first completed.6 Cameron County, at Brownsville, had restored the exterior of its 1912 building with county money between 1995 and 2000; it then applied to the new program for the remaining $7 million of interior and site work, and the building was rededicated as the county courthouse on October 17, 2006.7 Buildings by the architect in the entry on James Riely Gordon and Dallas County’s former courthouse, the subject of the entry on Old Red, are also on the list.68 The history of the building type itself is covered in the reference article on Texas county courthouses, and other institutions appear in the reference index.

Federal role

The commission serves as the State Historic Preservation Office required by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. In that role it surveys historic resources, nominates properties to the National Register of Historic Places, reviews federally controlled projects, helps administer the federal historic tax credit and the Certified Local Government program, and prepares the statewide preservation plan.1

References

  1. Texas Historical Commission, About. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Texas Historical Commission, Historical Markers. ↩ ↩2

  3. Texas Historical Commission, Courthouse Preservation. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  4. Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Texas Historical Commission. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11

  5. Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, County Courthouses. ↩

  6. Texas Historical Commission, Restored Historic Courthouses. ↩ ↩2

  7. Texas Historical Commission, Cameron County Courthouse. ↩

  8. Texas Historical Commission, Fayette County Courthouse. ↩