(The following talk was given by my mother at the 2006 meeting of the Texas Library Association, to the Friends of Texas Libraries. Her topic was “Backyard History: The Use of Archives in Local History,” about which she was personally invited to talk by the State Librarian of Texas. I was tremendously impressed with what she had to say, so I’m going to put it out here.)
It is my pleasure to be with you today and say a bit about the different approaches to the many uses to make of archives. I took the term “backyard” in the title seriously. As background, my library is a small rural institution blessed with limited resources. My own recollections appear too many times here. I’m sorry. As the last working founder of Comanche Public Library, there is not much of anybody else to interview from 1960.
Our theory has always been that every library needs some feature that is special to the institution. Ours, prejudice admitted, is our Texas and Local History Collection with its genealogy connections. Hopefully, this becomes a jewel to be enhanced and polished as time goes on.
Since you are Friends of Libraries you surely have a part in this for the Texas State Library or your favorite institution. I was told to talk about the use of archives rather than the development of archives. For us, these are interwoven.
A philosophy that has long governed our activity is two-fold. Since we were a small young institution, we began with the smallest of local history collections like one or two family history books, plus a very few published titles about Comanche County, and a type-it-yourself-to-get-a-copy-before-copy-machines-existed manuscript of a county history presented as a thesis to the University of Texas at Austin in 1948. We continued adding every Comanche County item we could scrounge. Archives might include microfilm resources, fiche, personal narratives, tax rolls on film, Census schedules and old newspapers on film. Photos, school items, club material, local history items of any kind.
Success, as all good Texas ranchers know, is based on wanting just what joins you. Thus we began adding information for the four counties that join us and the counties that join them and the counties . . . . You know where that one goes.
Our other governing principle is a motto: The Network Works. You can use the same technique. My first example did not result in publication but rather in the creation of an unusual work one would not think of at first.
My friend and expert mentor, the late Lucille Boykin, head of the genealogy division at Dallas Public Library, had wide knowledge of local history also. Jim Turner, a young man, came to her late in the summer of 1967 needing material on Populist political activity in Texas. Summer was over. He had to return to Harvard the next week to finish his senior year. The time was all gone. Lucille told him to write me at Comanche. His letter must have gone in the post box on his way out of Dallas. The network was working.
Comanche County had been a hotbed of Populist activity from the mid-1880s until after 1900, far longer than it was so important in the United States. Luckily, I was already interested and had some background material. Better yet, I had been able to interview some individuals who still knew something about the period from handed down family stories. It was a terrible time. A long lasting drought (1885-1887) wiped out many farmers and left economic problems that sloshed over into politics. It was a time period that changed some things forever. More of that later.
Jim and I learned many things working together. Unexpected treasure popped up in my ramble through old books. In our courthouse, a minute book from Comanche County Populist Party meetings with membership lists fell from a dusty corner. It was not a public record. The County Clerk did not want it. It was abandoned. That original handwritten document is with us today.
Jim and I corresponded all winter. This was his first attempt at a paper of this depth and complexity. He worked hard. His bibliography with manuscript, primary, and secondary sources ran to four crowded pages. I had some good contributions and got to edit the paper. In March 1968, Jim received the Harvard history department prize for the best undergraduate paper submitted that year. He admitted surprise when he graduated summa cum laude. A copy of his manuscript, a great combined information source, is in our archive today. The work was published in a scholarly journal years later. Jim has thanked me many times for the help. He has been a college professor for years. We have never seen one another to this day. The network worked.
The network worked again based on the same disastrous events of the mid-1880s, a time when mobs rode at night in Comanche County. Politics and hard times rolled together. Separate from this was what we now identify as a “racial cleansing” incident. It has nothing to do with the usual causes, voting rights, or other typical problems.
Tragically, there was an incident in 1886 in which a young Black man, a farm laborer, murdered the mistress of the house in a rural area of Comanche County. This was the second similar incident in a twelve-year period. It was well remembered.
Pursuit of the man, anger among residents, and other tragic events ended with a lynching. In the days afterward some citizens pressured the local Blacks to leave the county. A stable level-headed group of businessmen tried to keep this at bay but could not. Local Blacks were forced to abandon their homes, property, and everything. They were given ten days to be gone. Some employers made every effort to protect them and avoid this; it did not work. The Black population left and has not returned. A published account of this episode has kept this event from fading into history.
The Network worked again when a journalist called our library in 2003 wanting information about this tragedy. Since I knew about this and the prejudice that remains, my response was wary. Elliot Jaspin, of the Washington Post, was on the phone. He was an unknown interested in a topic that remains problematical even today. Occasionally we still get contacts from journalists looking for sensationalism and wishing to stir old trouble. After exchanging information with e-mail and phone calls, a real correspondence started. Trust grew.
As a serious astute researcher and a former Pulitzer Prize recipient, Elliot got me on his side. He visited us in August of 2003 to continue the information search. He was full of questions. There were evaluations over which we sometimes disagreed and ideas we tore apart many times. We’ve worked strenuously attempting to keep everything absolutely level and honest. I still do not know whether we succeeded.
I was drawn into collecting information from our resources. We used Census population schedules, Agriculture Census records, local tax records and land records for sources. We analyzed personal information from local newspaper archives to paint the background and depict the individuals involved. Pieces of local history data built a background. Having familiar, well understood, and interwoven information handy without having to chase everywhere proved a major asset. A local “grassroots” historian threw in with us and combined archival sources to study the population, ethnic factors, cultural background, physical distribution, and economic facets. It made a useful snapshot.
Originally, it was not clear how much local history information Elliot had collected over years of rounding up bits and pieces. Then the snowball rolled faster as he squeezed every free minute doing research in many U.S. locations. By today, he has a contract, a good advance, and has taken leave from his job. He is hurrying to finish Buried in the Bitter Waters: the Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America to be published by Basic Books on the fall list. This started with a telephone call to a small rural library and the network worked.
You can add more evidence that the network works. You know that libraries are often enriched from strange sources, simple friendship or personal contact. Who knows what places hold friendly eyes and ears?
Some scrapbooks full of newspaper clippings preserved for a family brought out the crying need to preserve the entire newspaper back file. This was the basis for our library receiving microfilm of all surviving issues of the Comanche Chief, a huge, expensive project. We could never have secured this except by gift. The newspaper owners did for us what we could not do for ourselves. They paid all costs, deposited the film with us, and continue to keep this project rolling. The network works.
A combination of hard work, endless time invested, and diverse local materials produced a local history jewel finished a few weeks ago. It could happen wherever you are, too. Soda Springs Community, Comanche County, Texas is the work of a pair with diversified skills and determination. James Chapman has devoted years at our library to collecting information on the community where he grew up. Many notebooks lean together on his shelves. He is a retired teacher and school administrator who loves the research phase. He swears he can’t write. We do not quite believe it. A teacher who is his cool, smart, very computer-literate bride of nearly fifty years retired for the second time. She knew if James’s work was not published it would become paper trash. They set out with Donna keeping a firm hold on the whip and the chair as well as her keyboard, mouse and scanner.
The Soda Springs community is gone. They drew out an eight mile square territory based on old-time school districts and land records. They added borrowed vintage photographs, family information, data from long-vanished rural schools, interviews and oral histories, and the predictable Census, land, tax, and old newspaper records. The book, handsomely printed on good paper, is well indexed and beautifully bound. It is a winner.
Sometimes we look askance at self-published items but this volume is the exception that proves the rule. A second volume of genealogy information and data about area cemeteries is promised by year’s end.
Before leaving, let’s watch the network work again as the Chapmans enhanced our library from a different angle, having uncovered a set of local scrapbooks in the Soda Springs project. In the 1950s, Texas had rural community improvement contests. Entries were based on scrapbooks created by community members. They covered land improvement, improved houses, churches, or farm structures, remodeling, new furnishings or a new water well. The scrapbooks were a combination of narratives and photographs in scrapbook format. Of course, these are a capsule portrait of a time now gone. Donna was able to round up five of these by borrowing copies scattered in private hands. Many were fragile originally, damaged over the years, and deteriorating. We were able to copy them all for preservation purposes but we would never have found these ourselves. Again, the network worked.
We located a similar set of these scrapbooks covering the Newburg community, the state-wide contest winner in 1959. A different friend loaned these for copying. An outstanding feature in the Newburg set is a photographic section with each family in the community standing before their own residence. Speak of a moment frozen in time! Again, a friend pointed the way. The network worked.
Probably nothing has been mentioned that is unfamiliar to you, but I hope this few minutes has helped you think of new ways to turn materials and use them for fresh purposes.
