Unfamiliar Street Names in Familiar Places

 

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).

Without Documents

In 2016, Digital & Web Services and the Wittliff Collections worked together to create an exhibit based on material in the Dick J. Reavis collection. The National Tour of Texas is an interactive website based on Dick J. Reavis ’s 1987 year long journey driving every highway in Texas.

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More recently Dick Reavis gave us permission to digitize and make available his 1978 book Without Documents, which sets out to examine the history of undocumented aliens in the United States. It examines the history of immigration, and in particular the history of Mexican immigration.

The entire book is now freely available in our Digital Collections Repository https://digital.library.txstate.edu/handle/10877/7761

 

The issues examined in the book are not only relevant forty years later, but have taken center stage in our current political debates. Dick Reavis was quite prescient in his final statement in the forward:

“For a variety of reasons, it is unlikely that Congress or federal agencies will do anything soon to resolve the question of undocumented immigration, or to alleviate the problems of immigrants themselves. Legislation currently pending in the Senate and House is largely of value for vote-getting purposes, and it is likely that undocumented immigration will continue to be an element in campaigning into the future. Therefore, this book should make important reading for a long time to come.”

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Catalog Cards and Fiche

Texas State University has recently completed building an Archives & Research Center which will serve as an offsite storage facility for collections. In preparation, units have been weeding the collection and identifying items to be moved offsite.

The old backup microfiche copy of the library online catalog is one such collection identified for weeding.

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The National Tour of Texas

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This unique project brought together specialists in GIS, web development, and digitization to create an interactive website based on Dick J. Reavis ’s 1987 year long journey driving every highway in Texas.

Dick J. Reavis is the award-winning author of seven books, including The Ashes of Waco: An Investigation; If White Kids Die: Memories of a Civil Rights Movement Volunteer; Catching Out: The Secret World of Day Laborers and more. He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, a Senior Editor at Texas Monthly, and a finalist for a National Magazine Award. He is now Emeritus Associate Professor of English at North Carolina State University.  While on assignment for Texas Monthly in the late 1980s, Mr. Reavis got lost and pulled from his glove box his official Texas Highway map. Looking at the map, the thought occurred to him, “there sure are a lot of roads on that map … I wonder if anyone has ever driven them all.” He decided he would try.

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History of Spring Lake

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In a previous post I discussed a project to digitize and create an exhibit related to the history of Aquarena Springs. Entitled The “History of Spring Lake”, the online exhibit is now available. Only a portion of the archives’ materials are included in this exhibit.

This “History of Spring Lake” exhibit was initially planned and constructed by Jason Crouch, a Graduate Student in the Public History Program at the Texas State University Center for Texas Public History. Digitization support was provided by Digital Media Specialist, Jeremy Moore. Programming support and customization of the Omeka site was provided by Jason Long. Additional support provided by Todd Peters, Head, Digital & Web Services.

This exhibit was edited and revised to feature a variety of primary source materials from the University Archives. The purpose of this exhibit is to provide a brief history of Spring Lake; it is not meant to be an exhaustive history of the people, places, or details.

The University Archives would like to thank Anna Huff and John Fletcher for providing content representing The Meadows Center, as well as the local repositories and local collections that allowed us to feature their materials in this exhibit.

And the earth did not swallow him

dvd-coverWe recently completed a fun project that is notable for a few reasons. The first is because the subject of the project was creating on online exhibit on the making of Severo Perez’s beautiful film, … and the earth did not swallow him, based on Tomás Rivera’s classic 1971 Chicano novel, …y no se lo tragó la tierra, which is a semi-autobiographical novel that recounts the life of workers and families of the migrant camps where his family stayed while doing farm work. In 1995 Severo Perez wrote an English screenplay, using his own translation, produced, and directed a film version of the novel. The film was well received and received critical acclaim and several film awards.

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Then and Now

Several websites that feature juxtaposed historic and recent images have appeared over the last year. It is a fun way to showcase historic images in an archive. The Knight Lab at Northwestern University has created an easy tool to create photo juxtapositions. The software allows a user to move a slider to swipe between the two versions of an image.

We decided to use the JuxtaposeJS software to create a few test images to learn more about the process. We took a couple of prints of historic photos of Old Main we had recently digitized, and tried to find the locations from where they were shot.  For this pilot project, we did not use the high resolution PhaseOne digital camera. We wanted to keep the amount of equipment we needed to carry to a minimum on our first attempt, so Jeremy used a smaller Olympus OM-D E-M5II capable of stitching together 40mb images from several shots, and a tripod.

The resulting images were scaled and visual reference points lined up in Adobe Photoshop. The JuxtaposeJS  website automatically creates the HTML embed code to insert into a website.

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Click to view juxtaposed Then and Now images of Old Main.

 

Old School Work Study

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During the early part of the University’s history, “work study” apparently meant something different than it does today. While listening to  a digitized 1974 oral history, I stumbled upon an amusing recollection from Biology professor Thacher R. Gary and his wife Nawona (both also 1940 graduates of Southwest Texas State Teachers College.)

 

 

 

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Jessie and Claude Kellam, 1923

 

 

They recalled the hardships on students in the 1920s and 1930s and that most students worked and many could only afford one meal a day. In recalling that some would do anything to stay in school, they recount that several students had kept cows on campus in the early years, including J. C.  Kellam and his brother, and they would sell the milk to other students to help earn money.

 

 

Library Exhibit

Digital & Web Services Exhibit

Digital & Web Services Exhibit

The Digital & Web Services Department has mounted a physical exhibit in the Alkek Library to showcase digitization at the Library. It is scheduled to be displayed from September through December 18, 2015. Located on the 1st floor of the Alkek Library and entitled From Paper to Pixels: Digitization at the Alkek Library, it uses samples from recent projects to provide a look at some of the equipment and procedures used for digitization.

Front page of the 1929 San Marcos Record

 

Included are over-sized prints including the Taffola Manuscript, the restored Sallie Beretta Painting and older issues of the school newspaper.

 

 

 

The exhibit also features a step by step photo breakdown of the dis-binding process used in preparation for scanning the Pedagogs, the student yearbook.

interferenceAlthough the title of the exhibit only mentions paper, it also features work on digitizing audio and video. Physical examples of open reel, cassette, Betacam and Hi-8 tapes are on display and screens-shots demonstrating the capture of audio are shown.

Selected photographs printed from the unlabeled negative project are also on display including a large print of Dana Jean Smith and Gloria Odoms, taken on the day Southwest Texas State College was officially integrated in February 1963.

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Past Wimberley floods recalled

The University Archives holds nearly 200 oral histories on open reel and cassette tape, dating from the 1970s through the early 2000s. Graduate student Virginia Pickel has begun digitizing these materials.

A recent open reel tape digitized contains an interesting section in light of the devastating floods which hit the Wimberley and San Marcos areas in May 2015.
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In 1974, longtime Wimberley residents Mr. & Mrs. Emmet Cowan participated in a recorded interview for an oral history project.  This excerpt contains a short portion of the recording where the interviewer asked if they had ever seen any floods of the Blanco river. They recall a major Blanco flood  in May 1929 that forced them to move to higher ground and minor flooding in 1900 and 1957-58.