A Guide to the Grazing Industry Papers, 1935-1940

Historical Note

In 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a governmental agency devoted to creating jobs for public works projects. Associate Director of the Federal Writers’ Project, Luther Harris Evans, proposed to Harry Hopkins, the director of the WPA, that a project be implemented for a nation-wide survey of historical materials. This resulted in the founding of the Historical Records Survey, a subdivision of the Federal Writers’ Program. The Survey focused on unpublished documents while collecting information on and preparing inventories of historical collections in repositories throughout the country, especially those pertaining to government records.

The Grazing Service of the Department of the Interior requested that the Survey undertake a project to create a compilation of the history of grazing in seventeen states, including Texas. The project incorporated historical records from the western range and livestock industry, including journals, diaries and interviews with ranchers.

Sources:

Nance, Joseph Milton. "Texas Historical Records Survey."Handbook of Texas Online. Accessed December 16, 2010. http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/nct01.

Sparks, Barbara Elaine Heath. The History of Grazing in Texas: An Analytical Inventory of the Findings of the Historical Records Survey. M.A. Thesis, Southwest Texas State University, 1973.

Scope and Contents

The Grazing Industry Papers, 1935-1940, 1973, contains the records of the Works Progress Administration’s Historical Records Survey of the history of grazing in Texas. Comprised of newspaper clippings and typescripts of reports and essays, the records document the livestock industry, including cattle, horses, and buffalo, as well as cowboy culture, westward expansion, ranching, and the western range from the colonial period to World War I. The collection includes excerpts from the magazines Farm and Ranch, The Cattleman, and Frontier Times; a circular published by the WPA containing suggestions on techniques for compiling data, writing, and editing material for a history of grazing; and Barbara Elaine Heath Sparks’ master’s thesis of an analytical inventory of the collection.

Restrictions

Access Restrictions

This collection is open for research use.

Related Material

Administrative Information

Preferred Citation

Grazing Industry Papers, 1935-1940, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.

Processing Information

This collection was processed by M.J. Ellison, Sr, February 1974.

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 "History Revealed: Bringing Collections to Light" project, 2009-2011.

Detailed Description of the Papers