27. Texas and local history

This collection of speeches, correspondences, reports, and photographs documents the work of Albert Thomas, U.S. Representative for Harris County, Texas, from 1936-1966. Albert Thomas was the first Rice Alumnus to serve in Congress. He graduated from Rice Institute in 1920.

This collection contains a compilation of letters to and from Colonel House regarding business deals, financial holdings, and politics. The majority of the letters are addressed to Thomas C. Dunn. Other correspondents include: Dewitt C. Dunn, Secretary McAdoo of the Treasury Department, and Paul M. Warburg. Topics discussed include real estate, federal and regional reserve banks.

One folder with one 13 pg. letter to the governor of Texas from Roy H. Heiskell and two letters from the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, Custodians of the Alamo, to Roy H. Heiskell regarding the proper spelling of his great-great uncle (and Alamo defender) Charles M. Heiskell’s name in the historical record at the Alamo.

Over one half of the collection documents cattle ranching, oil prospecting, and banking in Texas, as well as personal and family life during the Great Depression. The William Allen Haynes collection offers a view of living conditions of a prosperous Central Texas rancher and entrepreneur as well as providing information on conditions in Texas in the first part of the 19th century.

The papers of Dickson Fagan (1903-1977), Austin, Texas attorney active in the Democratic Party, include correspondence with both state and national political figures as well as Fagan's personal and business subject files clippings, published materials and notes, dating from 1950-1978.

This guest book is filled with the signatures and comments of guests who visited the Peden family’s lake house in Clear Lake, Texas, called “Miramichi.” There are also several diary entries chronicling important events in the Peden family, as well as events that occurred at Miramichi.

This collection is bound into an 8”x11” spiral binder, and contains typed transcripts of letters and recollections of various members of the Thomson family, describing family business, moves to Texas, general health of Texas colonists, the Mier Expedition, the Texan war for independence. Some accounts are first hand descriptions of participation, such as James Monroe Hill’s account of the Battle of San Jacinto.

On his 1835 trip from Georgia to Texas, Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar kept a manuscript diary. The journal is written in continuous narrative form, with frequent historical or descriptive passages inserted, covering the months June-October, 1835, the period during which Lamar apparently made his decision to settle in Texas permanently and join in the Texian battle for independence from Mexico.

This letter (10 January 1890) from Moses Austin Bryan letter to Col. W.W. Fontaine is in response to a series of questions concerning the revolutionary period in Texas history.

This collection contains legal documents, correspondence, and memoranda/research notes compiled by J.W. Parker, a lawyer from Taylor, Texas. The documents relate to the case of Charles W. Avery vs. Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway Co., a case in which Parker represented Avery.