The Houston Papers – Richardson Center for the Southwest

            One of the first collections that I processed at the Richardson Center was the transcription of letters and materials either signed by Sam Houston or sent to him.  The letters date from 1826 to 1860 spanning the time when Houston served as a United States Senator from Tennessee, through his tenure as president of the Republic of Texas, and later official documents during his time as governor of Texas.  Some of the letters written during his second term as president of the Republic of Texas deal with the printing of currency to fund the republic.  Other letters focus on personal matters.  Transcription was necessary because the ink is fading on many of the documents.  In addition, handwritten materials are difficult or impossible to word search.  So far OCR (Optical Recognition) software to accurately perform that task is just not all that good.  Apparently schools are no longer teaching cursive writing so future generations will have to rely on transcriptions to read these types of letters.  Seems like a loss to me, but no one asked my opinion.

            For archivists or at least this archivist the history or provenance of these letters and papers is particularly interesting.  They point to problems facing archivists dealing with old papers and highlight the need to maintain the integrity of a collection.  Remember one of my first posts in which I listed the two most important principles of archival processing: provenance and original order.  Both concepts are missing in the Houston papers.  In all likelihood the Houston papers were originally part of the R. C. Crane collection at the Center.  Crane was a Sweetwater, Texas, attorney with a long term interest in Texas history.  He was one of the founders of the West Texas Historical Association and served as president for many years.  He was also a paper collector.  At one time all of his personal papers were at Hardin-Simmons, but these papers were transferred to the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University several years ago.  Some of the antique papers amassed by Crane were kept at Hardin-Simmons.  These papers include Civil War documents among other things.  None of these antique documents have been processed.  The Houston papers have handwritten prices in one corner indicating that they were sold.  In all likelihood they were separated from the Crane documents because of the importance of the Houston signature.  (Although I have been told that Houston was a prolific writer and his signature is on many, many documents decreasing their value I suppose.  Still it is Sam Houston.)  Any other information regarding the origin of the papers may be in the Crane personal papers at the Southwest Collection.  To my knowledge these have not yet been processed.

            The moral of this story is that collections should be kept together.  Knowing where papers are from, their history or provenance not only authenticates the document, but also provides a complete story more interesting than just a famous signature.