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Collecting our History: 35 Years of Special
Collections
by Evelyn Barker
Walk into almost any high school, college, or public library in the United States and you will find the same thing: Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling; Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte; Time magazine. There will be best-selling and award-winning books on one shelf, and the classics on another. You will find a book that is now a major motion picture (although the book was better), and the self-help book that will get your life back on track (again). When you move to a new town, you need not fear that the library does not own the works of Stephen King from Bag of Bones to The Tommyknockers. These are all good things. That we can produce books so cheaply and so copiously, and then allow the public to borrow those books freely, is absolutely marvelous and a hallmark of a great society. But some lucky libraries have a little something extra: a section for the rare, valuable, historical, and irreplaceable. Libraries often call this section Special Collections--a dead giveaway that this part of the library is, well . . . special. Special Collections are completely unique. Unlike the high school, college, or public library, no two Special Collections are exactly alike. Even if two or more Special Collections focus on a common subject (for example, Texas history), no library will have the same sets of handwritten letters and diaries, a duplicate accumulation of photographs, or interchangeable holdings of first-edition books signed by the author. The Beginning of UT Arlington's Special CollectionsThirty-five years ago, on March 3, 1974, the Library opened its Special Collections with great fanfare. The impetus for this opening was an incredible donation of over 10,000 books, documents, manuscripts, and other items by Jenkins and Virginia Garrett of Fort Worth, Texas. The Dallas Morning News hailed the Garrett’s gift as one of the most “thorough concentrations of Texas history to 1850.” In a 2003 biographical article, Gerald Saxon wrote that Mr. Garrett, while attending the University of Texas in the 1930s, attended a U.S. history class taught by the great historian Walter Prescott Webb and became fascinated with Webb’s idea of history as an adventure that impacted people over time. Webb also introduced Mr. Garrett to Texas’s importance to the West and the U.S. as a whole. These lectures stayed with Mr. Garrett. During the 1940s and early 1950s, he concentrated on supporting the war effort, building his career as an attorney, and starting a family. Not until the late 1950s did Mr. Garrett begin to fully succumb to the “disease” of collecting, as he called it. During his travels in the U.S. and abroad, he visited many bookstores and began amassing items related to Texas history and the United States' war with Mexico of 1846-1848. Among the exceptional pieces he collected are courtship letters from Sam Houston to Anna Raguet, broadsides such as the Texas Declaration of Independence (March 2, 1836), and a book of Spanish explorations published in 1601. But, as Saxon wrote, Mr. Garrett was interested in more than just collecting; he wanted others to use and appreciate the items he had gathered. With that goal in mind, Mr. Garrett, then a member of the UT System Board of Regents (1969-1975), donated the collection to the University of Texas at Arlington Library. After this outstanding beginning, Special Collections began growing along the lines laid out by the Garretts and now encompasses the history of Texas, Mexico, and the Southwest, as well as that of UT Arlington. About the ExhibitTruly, the UT Arlington Library’s Special Collections has transformed from a jewel in 1974 to a treasure trove in 2008. The Spring 2009 exhibit, "Collecting our History: 35 Years of Special Collections," celebrated the evolution of Special Collections by focusing on five areas of strength: the histories of UT Arlington, the Fort Worth area, Texas, labor unions, and cartography. While these five areas are not Special Collections' only strengths, they represent the diversity and depth of the whole collection.
Rebels and MavericksIn 1951, as Jim Crow began to slink slowly away from the United States, Arlington State College (ASC) embraced the romanticism of the Deep South by choosing Rebels as the college’s mascot, replacing the lackluster Blue Riders. Once the mascot was determined, it was natural for other motifs of the Confederacy to appear around that theme. Band uniforms sported a large Confederate flag. “Dixie” became the fight song. Student Congress flew the Confederate flag outside of the student center. None of this was a problem for the all-white student body of ASC; however, in 1962, ASC integrated. That same year, the campus newspaper, The Shorthorn, editorialized that the Confederate Rebel theme was no longer appropriate. This was the beginning of what would be a long battle, pitting tradition and school pride against a modern sense of justice and sensitivity. University archives tell the story of the most divisive issue in campus history. Casa Mañana: House of TomorrowHistorian T. R. Fahrenbach wrote, “The great difference between Texas and every other American state in the twentieth century was that Texas had a history.” In 1836, Texian forces defeated Mexican troops and established Texas as a republic. To commemorate that event, the state held a massive centennial celebration in 1936. As part of the celebrations, the state chose Dallas to host the official exposition, a $25 million affair that rated national publicity. Dallas and Fort Worth had engaged in a rivalry for years, but when Fort Worth city leaders (namely, Fort Worth Star-Telegram publisher Amon Carter) saw all the publicity and money flowing to Dallas, they decided to mount a competing exposition. They initially planned a memorial to the livestock industry, then changed to a Frontier Days Exposition promoting Fort Worth's claim of being “Where the West Begins.”
In the first few months of 1936, Carter, a tireless promoter of Fort Worth and West Texas, and William Monnig, a Fort Worth merchant and community leader, became alarmed at what would surely be the amateurish result of the Frontier exposition in progress. Fort Worth constantly worked to upstage and out-do Dallas, and it would be a crippling blow to the city's pride if the Fort Worth exposition was a laughing-stock. Carter and Monnig took drastic action: they hired New York theater producer and nightclub owner Billy Rose to produce the Frontier Centennial.
The result, conceived and executed in a few short months, went beyond anyone's expectations and, despite being only a fraction of the size and cost of the Dallas exposition, managed to give Dallas some serious competition for tourist dollars. Illustrated by Fort Worth Star-Telegram images, the exhibit shows the grandeur of Casa Mañana—an unforgettable spectacle during the Great Depression. It's a Good Thing to Join the Union The Great Depression spurred a sharp rise in leftist and socialist art, music, and literature in the United States. Labor organizations started using the arts, particularly plays and music, to instruct audiences who had low literacy rates. The arts also served as entertainment and social opportunities for workers and advertised the capabilities and benefits of unions through a variety of media. Using song books, scripts for plays, and hand-drawn posters, the exhibit shows the passion and commitment of labor organizers to the cause. Thinking of You: Civil War Letters, Diaries and MementosLetters and diaries of soldiers and civilians contain rich, personal memoirs that reveal the stress of separation from loved ones, terrible fatalities of family members, and perceptions of wartime through details of mundane experiences. Broadsides, newspapers, and maps helped people on both sides of the conflict understand the momentous events of a consuming and destructive war in which over 600,000 people died, thousands of others were wounded or disabled, and families experienced devastating emotional and financial losses. In this exhibit, Civil War-era diaries and letters show the personal side of war on Texas citizens and soldiers. The Alexis-Hubert Jaillot Copperplate, 1674The reign of Louis XIV saw a greater emphasis on culture and the arts and France became the world’s cultural leader. The Alexis-Hubert Jaillot copperplate is an artifact of the Golden Age of France and a true rarity of Special Collections. (Collecting our History: 35 Years of Special Collections was curated by Evelyn Barker and designed by Erin O'Malley. Special Collections extends its sincere thanks to Evelyn for her work on the exhibit and on this article.)
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