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Reference · Organization

Texas State Library and Archives Commission

The Texas State Library and Archives Commission is the Texas state agency responsible for the official archival record of state government, for support of public, academic and school libraries, for helping public agencies manage their records, and for the Talking Book Program for readers with disabilities.1 Its archives division reports more than 200 million pages of archival documents and more than two million volumes of printed library material.2 Among its holdings is the original of William Barret Travis’s letter from the Alamo of February 24, 1836.3

History

A national library for the Republic of Texas was established by an act President Mirabeau B. Lamar signed in 1839, and its first acquisition was a thirteen volume Edinburgh Encyclopedia. The Republic’s archives were kept separately and moved to Austin the same year.4 A law of 1876 creating the Department of Insurance, Statistics, and History made the State Library the legal depository of the archives of the state.5 The Capitol fire of 1881 destroyed most of the library’s small collection.4

The legislature created the Texas State Library and Historical Commission in 1909 to supervise the State Library. Its duties included collecting material on the history of Texas, publishing manuscript archives and administering the records of state departments.6 The commission first had three members appointed by the governor and two who served ex officio; a 1919 law gave the governor all five appointments, and in 1953 the commission grew to six members serving six year terms.6 The legislature renamed the agency the Texas State Library and Archives Commission in 1979.6

For much of the twentieth century the records lacked a secure home. The Handbook of Texas describes archives stored in the Capitol basement, a cowbarn in North Austin and a Quonset hut at Camp Hubbard, and many records that had deteriorated almost completely by 1947.5 The State Archives and Library Building was completed in 1961, dedicated in 1962 and renamed in 1973 for Lorenzo de Zavala, first vice president of the Republic.4 The Sam Houston Regional Library and Research Center in Liberty is a unit of the state archives.4

Holdings

The archives hold records from Spanish and Mexican Texas, the Republic and the state. They include the Nacogdoches Archives, muster and pay rolls from the adjutant general’s office, including rolls of the State Police of the Reconstruction era, comptroller’s records such as military service claims and pension papers, and a mass of papers on subjects from colonization and boundaries to railroads, the background to studies such as railroad land grants before 1876.5 The law making the library the depository for the archives passed in 1876, the year voters adopted the Constitution of 1876 on February 15.57 The papers of Mirabeau B. Lamar and of John H. Reagan were each bought for $10,000 under acts of 1909.5

Some records sit elsewhere. The archives of the General Land Office remained with that office, a point relevant to land office county maps.5 Legislative branch records are administered by the Legislative Reference Library.2 Since 1971, regional depositories have held local government records, and county deeds, wills, marriage and probate records microfilmed by the Genealogical Society of Utah can be borrowed through that system, a source discussed in county marriage books.5

The agency also holds the voter registration lists of 1867 to 1870, which it describes as its only comprehensive listing of eligible voters, digitized from reference microfilm and viewable on its Texas Digital Archive.8 The agency is also a contributing partner of the Portal to Texas History, the digital library of the University of North Texas.9 The Texas Digital Archive opened to the public in 2016 with the records of Governor Rick Perry’s administration and more than 20,000 digitized prints and photographs.4

The Travis letter

The letter was carried from the Alamo by Captain Albert Martin, who added a postscript, and at Gonzales Lancelot Smither added his own note to its back.3 It later passed to Travis’s daughter and her descendants. In 1891 her grandson John G. Davidson placed it on loan with the Department of Agriculture, Insurance, Statistics, and History, and in May 1893, after proposing a sale, he agreed to a price of $85.3 Custody passed to the new commission on March 19, 1909, and the letter has left the agency only once, on loan to the Texas Centennial exposition in 1936.3 Its text and afterlife are covered in the entry on the Victory or Death letter.

Other record types discussed on this site, among them church registers kept before civil registration, Galveston passenger lists and advertisements as economic data, are treated in essays of their own. Related entries are listed in the reference index.

References

  1. Texas State Library and Archives Commission, About Us. ↩

  2. Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Archives and Reference. ↩ ↩2

  3. Texas State Library and Archives Commission, William Barret Travis’ Letter from the Alamo, 1836. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  4. Texas State Library and Archives Commission, The History of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  5. Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Texas State Archives. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7

  6. Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Texas State Library and Archives Commission. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  7. Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Constitution of 1876. ↩

  8. Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Texas Secretary of State voter registration lists, 1867 to 1870. ↩

  9. The Portal to Texas History, University of North Texas Libraries, Partners. ↩