Digital & Web Services is continuing to capture images from our collection of negatives from the San Marcos Daily Record and uploading them to a Flickr site. One image from 1961 looked like a familiar intersection, Sessom and University in front of the Texas State University campus near the head of the San Marcos River and the old grist mill, now Kerbey Lane Cafe. The folder containing the negative labels it  “Colorado St at Bridge.” Colorado Street was a previous name for what is now called University Drive which runs in front of Texas State past the round Theatre Center and River House (formerly the American Legion building) across the street.

However, zooming in on the street sign surprisingly reveals this is the corner of Jeff Davis and Olmos.

According to the San Marcos Daily Record (6-3-1971), the City Council voted to rename Olmos Dr. to Sessom Dr. in 1965, although even as of 1971 they still had not changed the street sign.  Olmos is most likely derived from Olmos Creek in North San Antonio, which runs through Alamo Heights into the head waters of the San Antonio River. The San Marcos Public Library has a number of resources on the history of San Marcos. Olmos is not listed as a surname in any of the early San Marcos telephone directories, in the family name indexes for the Hays County Historical and Genealogical Society Quarterly, or in Dudley Dobie’s A brief history of Hays County and San Marcos, Texas.

The street running in front of the University has changed names a few times over the years and has included the name King of Trails Highway, according to a 1922 Sanborn Insurance map. Although officially named Colorado Street, in 1931 it also became Jeff Davis Hwy.  In 2016, Texas State University removed a marker along University Dr. installed in 1931 designating the route as the “Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway No. 2.”  There is a similar marker along South Congress Avenue in Austin.

A University task force recently released a report titled Historical Background and Context: Sallie Ward Beretta and John Garland Flowers.  The task force conducted a scholarly analysis of two important persons in the history of Texas State that have buildings named after them. A section of the report relevant to the question of the street names, is a section that describes Sallie Ward Beretta’s role with the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) project to rename existing roads in Texas in honor of the president of the Confederate States of America. ( A previous blog post discussed the digital restoration of a painting of Sallie Ward Beretta).

In September 2021, the LBJ Museum in San Marcos, Texas requested assistance in preserving two prints at risk of further degrading while on display.  To keep any further aging from affecting the original, I also provided replacement prints for viewing so the originals could be safely stored away.  One of the images, a 1939 portrait of Lyndon Baines Johnson, also had a difficult to read inscription in faded red ink.  The museum manager approved creating a black and white version on the image, since the original print’s color was largely due to staining and yellowing from age.  Due to the strong color of the ink, I was then able to use a Black & White Filter in Photoshop to provide the museum with a much more legible print for display.

The original image and inscription.

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The variety of projects is always one of the more exciting parts of working here. For a Russell Lee exhibit that is currently on display at the Redwood Library & Athenæum in Newport, RI, we received a request through the Wittliff Collections to digitize two images of the photographer Russell Lee at a scale large enough to cover two walls in the show.

The dimensions of the photographs to digitize are 4.25″ x 3.25″ and 13.375″ x 7.875″ respectively, so creating a digital file from these with a high enough resolution to print at a final size of over 8′ at 100 px/in isn’t something even our best equipment can manage in a single shot. To solve this problem, we captured each photograph in smaller sections and then combined those together to create a seamless final image. The smaller photograph is a combination of 6 images in Photoshop for the final digital file, and the larger took only 2 images.

One of the photographs of Russell Lee prepared on the capture station.

Once we had our final image, we knew we wanted to see for ourselves what they could look like when printed for the wall. This is where we love having the help of our digital technicians to demonstrate!

Digital technicians holding two panels of a print side by side outside of Alkek Library.

A cropped section of the smaller original photograph on the floor, with students for scale.  From the left: Jessica Henriquez, Reba Jenson, and Allen Garza.