Charles Ulrich Connellee (1851-1930) was a surveyor and Texas state legislator. He
was known as the
Connellee served as county surveyor of Scott County, Kentucky, for a short time in 1874 before moving to Dallas, Texas, where he founded a real estate enterprise. In January 1875 he bought a public square on 320 acres located in Eastland County, and in May, he and two partners, Jack S. Dougherty and J. B. Ammerman, surveyed the town of Eastland and successfully lobbied to make it the county seat.
During the early 1880s Connellee attempted to breed better cattle for local ranches, before turning to a political life. He served as representative from the Forty-second District in the Twenty-first and Twenty-second legislatures in the late 1880s. In 1911 he was a member of the board that established the state tuberculosis colony. Furthermore, he was a regent of the College of Industrial Arts (1925-1930), now Texas Woman's University. After his death in 1930, he was buried in Eastland.
The Charles Ulrich Connellee papers concern the activities of Connellee and relate to his services in the Twenty-first and Twenty-second Texas legislatures, as a regent of the College of Industrial Arts (1925-1930), as a member of the board that located and established the Texas tuberculosis colony (1911), and as a surveyor and founder of Eastland (1875). The papers include correspondence, legal documents, citations, broadsides, leases, receipts, financial records, land records, minutes, resolutions, speeches, circulars, letter presses, and abstract records.
Since Connellee had such a large impact on the development of Texas, his letters give intimate glimpses at the history and development of north and central Texas. Included in the papers are correspondence with Joseph Weldon Bailey, O. B. Colquitt, James E. Ferguson, and other political leaders. Additionally, the letters show Eastland's excitement about the discovery of oil and also trace the development of the oil industry.
The collection is open for research.
Charles Ulrich Connellee Papers, 1846-1918, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
Basic processing and cataloging of this collection was supported with funds from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) for the Briscoe Center’s