For one hundred years, the Texas State Library and Archives Commission has stood as a symbol of the state’s commitment to preserving the history of its people and their government, to securing the records of government for public scrutiny, and to extending and improving library service for all its people. In many ways, the history of the commission is the history of the development of libraries in Texas, the evolution of concern and care for the essential evidence of government, and the rise in public expectations for government transparency.

On March 19, 1909, Governor Thomas Campbell signed the bill that...

All that the members of the two-year-old Texas State Historical Association asked of the legislature in 1899 was creation of a Texas State Historical Commission. The proposed commission would raise the state library to the status of a separate agency of state government with responsibility for the government’s archives and historical artifacts; for collecting papers and books concerning the history of Texas, and the reminiscences of pioneers; and for accumulating materials particularly useful for reference by legislators conducting the state’s business.

All that the members of the Texas Federation of Women’s Clubs, organized the same year as the historical association...

Answering the governor’s call, four of the five members of the first Texas Library and Historical Commission assembled promptly at ten o’clock on Monday morning, March 29, 1909, in the capitol office of Texas superintendent of public instruction and ex officio commission member Robert Bartow Cousins to inaugurate their work. The commissioners had to know that the job before them was both to create a new agency and to continue the work of a state library that had been functioning off and on, to one purpose or another, for almost three-quarters of a century. What they would quickly discover was...

Soon after she arrived for work on the Monday after Easter of 1926, state librarian Octavia Fry Rogan discovered that sometime after the library closed late on Saturday afternoon, someone had broken the lock on a library vault in the capitol basement and thrown more than twenty-two large boxes of the library’s newspapers and periodicals into a pile in the corridor outside. Whoever did it then barred the door to the corridor from the inside so as to prevent their return. When early that same Monday morning, the fire marshal noticed the heap of paper cluttering the hallway, he ordered...

When she accepted election as the state librarian of Texas at the beginning of 1932, Fannie Miles Wilcox had reason to be apprehensive of the future. Texas had begun to feel the effects of the more than two-year-old Great Depression in full measure. The prices of cotton, cattle, corn, and oil had plummeted by more than half; cotton brought five cents a pound, and oil five cents a barrel. Nearly a quarter of the population of the state’s largest city—Houston—was out of work. Of the approximately 400,000 unemployed statewide, some 25 percent had exhausted all of their resources...

The year 1935 began a period of planning in order to bring change. Governments and organizations went to work studying resources and ways to manage them so as to extract the country, their organizations, and their people from the effects of the Depression. The Works Progress Administration (WPA), created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democratic Congress in the second round of agencies designed to take America out of its economic doldrums, encouraged the creation of local planning boards. The WPA put people to work too. Some $6 million allocated to Texas put librarians, historians, and archivists—two thousand...

Monday, February 18, 1946, was the kind of day the Texas Library and Historical Commission and the personnel of the Texas State Library that it governed had known just twice before. Only in its first meeting thirty-seven years earlier had the commission convened in an air of expectation equal to the anticipation that electrified the atmosphere on that February morning when it met for the first time with its new state librarian, Francis H. Henshaw. During the interview process, the commission had impressed on Henshaw that, with its three main divisions of general state library service (including extension work), archives...

“Woe is me,” wrote William L. McGill, Governor Allan Shivers’ executive secretary, on September 7, 1950, after hanging up from a thirty-seven-minute long-distance telephone call from Texas Library and Historical Commission chairman Virginia Gambrell.

What Gambrell hoped would pass without notice in the press in fact appeared in two of the most important papers for state and state government coverage when departing state librarian Francis Henshaw took his leaving public. “Henshaw said his resignation followed a long period of conflict charging that Mrs. Gambrell had attempted to substitute board administration instead of operation of the department by its executive,” the...

When the Texas Library and Historical Commission met in January 1954 to select the third acting state librarian and fourth person to head the agency in three years, the members had no trouble making their choice. Elevating Witt B. Harwell was easy, and not just because he already was the assistant state librarian and records chief. They agreed with outgoing state librarian T. J. Gibson that “his remarkable progress in the Records Division, his success with setting up a system of bookkeeping for the library, his visits to out-of-state libraries as well as to many over Texas, his participation in...

Some 127 years after Texas’ revolutionary government leader Don Carlos Barrett broached the idea of a library for Texas government, 126 years after the Congress of the Republic of Texas ordered the assembling of archives, 86 years after the legislature under the Constitution of 1876 joined the state’s library and archival functions in one agency, and 53 years after the undaunted stalwarts of the Texas Federation of Women’s Clubs, the resolute souls of the Texas Library Association, and the steadfast members of the Texas State Historical Association secured creation of the Texas Library and Historical Commission and established the Texas...