Texas Monthly: Chasing Papers From the Past
HOUSTON, January 27, 2012 -- In the February issue of Texas Monthly, senior editor Michael Hall examines an on-going effort by Baker Botts L.L.P. Partner Bill Kroger and Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson to encourage county clerks to save valuable historical documents that languish -- often unprotected to the ravishes of time and nature -- in courthouses across the Lone Star State.
Kroger is chair of the state Supreme Court’s Texas Court Records Preservation Task Force and has become something of an unofficial state historian, Hall writes in his article “The “Paper Chase.”
“Texas wasn’t settled by gunmen,” Kroger told Hall. “It was settled in large part by developing, county by county, a system of laws, with due process, an independent judiciary, and a functioning bar of lawyers. It’s why the center of every county seat is not a church but a courthouse.”
Locating key documents and enlisting county clerk’s help in creating restoration and preservation programs started in 2008. That year, Kroger wrote an article on Reconstruction for Houston Lawyer magazine and started researching another on noted jurist Nicholas Battle, a mid-nineteenth century Waco judge and slave owner who, as it happened, owned Chief Justice Jefferson’s great-great-great-grandfather Shedrick Willis.
Kroger asked the Chief Justice to take a trip to Waco with him to check the records for themselves. In December 2008, the two hit the road for the McLennan County Courthouse archives.
“What struck us,” Kroger told Hall, “was how vast the district clerk’s records were, which had led to a certain amount of disarray. It was hard for us to tell which books they had and which ones were missing. It was clear no one had ever looked through them -- to even try to would have risked destroying them. I remember touching some books and being worried that their binding would crumble in my hand.”
On the trip back to Houston, Kroger suggested creating a task force to address the record keeping situation not just in McLennan County but across the state. Chief Justice Jefferson recommended establishing the task force under the authority of the state Supreme Court.
Three years later, they have found court archives in many of the state’s 254 counties that have changed their sense of Texas history.
“It’s a very different picture than the one we grew up hearing about; a richer, deeper view,” Kroger told Hall. “I’ve always thought Texas history was centered on big events, like the Alamo, and important men like Sam Houston and Stephen F. Austin, and that the state was all pistols, barbed wire, and oil derricks.
“But that’s not how it played out in the lives of ordinary Texans. The state was slowly settled over an eighty-year history, and the history of Texas is really the story of hundreds of small groups of settlers trying to scratch out communities while facing conflicts and problems of all sorts. It’s 254 experiments.”
Baker Botts and the State Bar of Texas provided financial support for the task force.
The “Paper Chase” article by Michael Hall is in Texas Monthly but available only to subscribers.
The online edition of the magazine, however, provides public access to: