ETHA Newsletter

April, 2010

NEWS FROM THE DIRECTOR

Spring is known as the season of renewal, a time when many things begin the life cycle once again, and hope “springs eternal.” For our Association, we may not necessarily be launching a new life cycle, but we are “blossoming” in a number of ways. The end of February saw us complete our historic “East meets West” meeting in Fort Worth, and it was truly one that all those who attended will remember. Great sessions, a rousing musical program on Friday night from our own group of talented musicians (Archie McDonald, Anne Jordan, Donaly Brice, and Pat Hughes, along with the unique “stylings” of Dan Utley, who I guess we can now say may be our very own “Pappy” O'Daniel), and above all else fantastic fellowship and communion with our good friends from West Texas. To say the least, it was a lot of fun!

The staff is once again busy planning our Fall Meeting, but this year it will be one that includes some exciting new changes. This year the meeting will be held on the campus of Stephen F. Austin State University, at the Baker Pattillo Student Center. The venue change will allow us to better control meal costs while still holding a full and rewarding gathering. We will have accommodations blocks at three local hostelries located on South U.S. Hwy. 59. To more effectively coordinate transportation to and from the campus, shuttle buses will continuously make a “loop” for all meeting registrants at no extra charge. Our Friday night banquet will continue as a plated affair, and will be held at the Twilight Ballroom at the Pattillo Student Center. Afterward, shuttle buses will run both back to the hotels and also to the traditional after-banquet reception at the Old Town Center in downtown Nacogdoches. After sessions end on Saturday, we will invite all to attend our business luncheon at Millard's Crossing Historic Village just north of the Nacogdoches city limits. We will enjoy a traditional Texas bar-b-que (yes, yes, I know there are many ways to spell it—this is how I learned to in West Texas!) meal “on the grounds.” Following the meal, all guests will be able to tour Millard's Crossing at their leisure, and/or take an optional guided tour (at a nominal charge) of Nacogdoches County's Rosenwald School sites. It promises to be a memorable meeting.

Please take note of our upcoming events, which include the inaugural Archie McDonald Lecture with special guest former heavyweight champion George Foreman in April, and an Association sponsored symposium titled the “Great African American School Movement” in late June. If at all possible, please make plans to attend both affairs.

As a final note, I encourage all our members to recruit their friends, neighbors, and family members to join the Association. There is a reason we all love our organization and its mission—what nicer way to show your appreciation to all you know than to ask them to share your enthusiasm for the East Texas Historical Association. Membership is our “lifeblood,” and it is also a pleasure to join with your friends and loved ones in a common experience.

As always, thanks to all for what you do for the Association and your continued support!

UPCOMING EVENTS

• April 29, 2010 – Archie McDonald Speaker Series: The Archie McDonald Speaker Series welcomes George Foreman to the Stephen F. Austin State University Campus for “A Conversation with Mr. George Foreman: Reflections on my America.” For reservations and more information, visit http://www.sfasu.edu/archie or call (936) 468 – 2605.
• May 7 – 8, 2010 – Texas History Day: The Texas State Historical Association coordinates Texas History Day in Austin May 7 and 8. Students from around the state compete in presentations of historical projects. The top entries advance to National History Day competition at the University of Maryland June 13 – 17.
• June 26, 2010 – Great African-American School Movement Symposium: The East Texas Historical Association is sponsoring the Great African American School Movement Symposium. The Symposium will be held at Nacogdoches in the Baker Pattillo Student Center on the Stephen F. Austin State University Campus . For registration information contact the ETHA office at sosebeem@sfasu.edu or 936-468-2407.
• September 16, 17, 18, 2010 – East Texas Historical Association Fall Meeting: The next East Texas Historical Association Meeting will be held at the Stephen F. Austin State University campus September 16, 17, and 18. More information will be available in the future.
• September 16, 2010 – Lale Lecture: The Lale Lecture will be held September 16, 2010 on the Stephen F. Austin State University campus. Dr. Kenneth Brown of the University of Houston will speak.
• February 17 – 19, 2011 – East Texas Historical Association Meeting: The next East Texas Historical Association Spring Meeting will be held in Waco. More information will be available in the future.
• March 3 – 5, 2011: Texas State Historical Association Meeting: The Texas State Historical Association will hold its 115 th annual meeting for 2011 in El Paso at the Camino Real Hotel. You can find information on the meeting at TSHAonline.org.
• March 31 – April 2, 2011 - West Texas Historical Association Meeting: The next West Texas Historical Association Meeting will be held in Lubbock. For more information and a copy of the call for papers, you can contact the WTHA at http://swco.ttu.edu/WestTexas/index.htm or Ph. 806-742-9076.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

• Spanish Texas, 1519 – 1821, revised edition by Donald E. Chipman and Harriett Denise Joseph is now available through the University of Texas at Austin Press.
• Copies of Making East Texas, East Texas: Selections from The East Texas Historical Journal are available (both hard cover and paper back) for purchase through the East Texas Historical Association office. Contact the East Texas Historical Association office.
• In early February, staff from The History Center in Diboll installed a new exhibit, “The Heart of a Community: Angelina County Schools from 1885,” which consists of 22 panels of historical photographs and 4 cases of documents and artifacts dating from 1885. Much of the material and information comes from the Angelina County School Superintendent's Records donated by the Angelina County Historical Commission in 2004. The exhibit explores the place of the rural common schools in their communities, the impact of school reform and consolidation, and the role of teachers and administrators on school history. Several panels also address segregation and integration. The exhibit will be on display through the school year and into the summer.

MEMBER NEWS

• Dr. James V. Reese, 75, of Nacogdoches, Texas died Wednesday, March 17, 2010, while recovering from cancer surgery. James was born Dec. 23, 1934 in Itasca, Texas, son of James Ottie and Sally Mauvleen Reese. James, his parents, and sister Sally Sue moved to Pasadena, Texas, in 1943. He attended Pasadena High School, graduating in 1953, then attended Rice University where he completed a B.A. in History in 1957. He married Shirley Joel Martin, of Houston, Texas, on May 31, 1958, and they moved to Austin where James completed a M.A. in History at The University of Texas at Austin in 1961, and a PhD in History in 1964. James and Shirley moved to Lubbock, Texas, in 1962 where James worked as a professor of history at Texas Tech University until 1977. James also served as Associate Dean of the Graduate School at Texas Tech from 1972 – 1976 and Director of the Museum at Texas Tech from 1976 – 1977. James and family moved to Nacogdoches, Texas in 1977 where James served as Dean of Liberal Arts at Stephen F. Austin State University from 1977 – 1985 and Vice-President for Academic Affairs from 1985 – 1992. Afterward, he taught history until his retirement in 2003. James was active in the Texas State Historical Association, East Texas Historical Association [for which he was Past President and a Fellow], National Academic Deans Council, and was appointed to the Sam Houston Sesquicentennial Commission by Governor Ann Richards. An active liberal Democrat for all his adult life, James supported the ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center, and many similar groups. [taken from The Daily Sentinel , Nacogdoches, Texas, page 2A, Sunday, March 21, 2010]
• The Texas Left: The Radical Roots of Lone Star Liberalism from Texas A&M University Press is now available. Edited by David O'Donald Cullen and East Texas Historical Association member Kyle G. Wilkison, The Texas Left includes articles by several East Texas Historical Association members: “ ‘The Right to Work, to Starve, to Die': The Forgotten Radical Heritage of Texas,” by David O'Donald Cullen and Kyle G. Wilkison; “ ‘A Host of Sturdy Patriots': The Texas Populists” by Gregg Cantrell; “Texas…Unions…Time: Unions in Texas from the Time of the Republic through the Great War, 1838 – 1919” by George Norris Green; “Confronting White Supremacy: The African American Left in Texas, 1874 – 1974” by Bruce A. Glasrud and Gregg Andrews; “A Modern Liberal Tradition in Texas?” by Patrick Cox.
• Why Texans fought in the Civil War? By Charles David Grear is now available from Texas A&M University Press.
• The Great Southwest Railroad Strike and Free Labor by Theresa A. Case is now available from Texas A&M University Press.
• East Texas Historical Association / West Texas Historical Association Spring Meeting 2010: The East Texas Historical Association and the West Texas Historical Association met in a joint spring meeting at the DFW Marriott at Champion's Circle Hotel in Fort Worth, Texas from February 25 – 27. Both associations held Board of Directors meetings on Thursday afternoon followed by an opening panel discussion titled “Whither Texas History?: The State of Texas History and Its Future.” That evening, the East Texas Historical Association hosted a welcome reception. Friday morning began with the Presidential Breakfast followed by a variety of sessions such as “Religious Leaders of Texas,” “Texas Rangers: Real, Reel, and Media,” and “Texas Speakers of the U.S. House of Representatives.” The evening ended with a banquet presided over by Dr. James Smallwood, First Vice-President of the East Texas Historical Association. The program was “A Texas Serenade and Sing-Along” led by “The Distinguished Band of Renown.” Saturday morning began with the Women's History Breakfast followed by a variety of sessions such as “Tracing Trails, Drought and Water Laws in the Southwest,” “The Rise and Fall of the Tung Oil Industry in East Texas,” and “Sports in West Texas.” The Presidential Luncheon featured the Presidential Address by West Texas Historical Association President Dr. Tiffany Fink, “West Texas Women.” Some members stayed Saturday afternoon and evening to enjoy a tour of the Fort Worth Stockyards, dinner at Risckey's Bar-B-Que, and a rodeo.
• In recent weeks, The History Center in Diboll has hosted tours and programs for a number of groups including the Trinity County Historical Commission, The Lufkin Senior Kiwanis Club, the Diboll Garden Club, and 3 kindergarten classes from Lufkin's Garrett Primary. Topics covered included local history, preservation tips, World War II, gardening with native plants, and transportation in East Texas. In addition to speaking to these onsite groups, Center staff made presentations to a variety of group meetings. The director spoke to the Tyler County Heritage Society in Woodville, the Lufkin Evening Lions Club, and the Daughters of the American Revolution, while the archivist spoke to the Friends of the Angelina County Historical Commission about their oral history project.
• The History Center in Diboll plans to continue to explore the topics of segregation and integration, particularly in Diboll, with its ongoing Oral History project that focuses on the racial integration of Diboll Independent School District in the 1960's. Center staff and members of the Diboll Historical Society have already begun interviewing community members and will continue meeting with former students, teachers, administrators, school board members, and other members of the community in order to preserve their memories of this important part of Diboll's history.

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

Dr. Bernadette Pruitt, Sam Houston State University

This newsletter spotlights Dr. Bernadette Pruitt, author of the upcoming book “ Beautiful People”: African-Descent Communities, Agency, Work, and the Great Migrations to Houston, Texas, 1900-1941 , (College Station: Texas A. & M. University Press, 2011), which examines Black internal migration and community building in what ultimately became the fourth largest city in the United States. Dr. Pruitt's work is one of the first scholarly attempts to address the Great Black Migrations in Texas.  She is an Associate Professor of History at Sam Houston State University where she has been a member of the faculty since 1996. Her areas of research and teaching include Black civil-rights and internal migrations and community agency among Houston African Americans during the first half of the century.

Bernadette earned her BA and MA from Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas. She earned her PhD from University of Houston, the first African-American woman to earn a doctorate in history from University of Houston. In addition to the book accepted for publication, Dr. Pruitt contributed to the following book chapter: Bernadette Pruitt, Caryn Newman, and Katrina Hamilton.“ Seven Schoolteachers Challenge the Klan and Form Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority,” in Black Greek Letter Organizations: Our Fight Has Just Begun, ed ., Gregory S. Parks, 125-40. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. She has also published several journal articles, including “For the Advancement of the Race: African-American Migration to Houston, 1914-1941.” In The Journal of Urban History 31, No 4 (May 2005): 435-78 and “In Search of Freedom: Black Migration to Houston, 1914-1945.” In The Houston Review of History and Culture 3, No. 1 (Fall 2005): 48-57, 85-86.

Dr. Pruitt has received several fellowships and awards throughout her career, most recently the Fred White Jr. Research Fellowship in Texas History from the Texas State Historical Association in March 2010. She is a past recipient of a Post-Doctoral Fellow and Research Associate from the Department of African-American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago; a Post-Doctoral Fellowship Award from the Center for African-American Urban Studies and the Economy, Department of History at Carnegie-Mellon University; and the Mary M. Hughes Research Fellowship in Texas History from the Texas State Historical Association.

FEATURED ARTICLE

The Houses that Oil Built
By Chris Elzen

While much of the nation suffered through economic depression, many East Texans' experiences were quite different. With the discovery of the East Texas Oil Field, money and people flowed into the region, and without a doubt the significance of the East Texas Oil Boom in regional growth could not be ignored. However, one of the less thoroughly examined aspects of the period is the explosion of new construction and the introduction of new architectural styles to East Texas, most apparent in the area's largest urban center—the city of Tyler.

At present, Tyler has designated five districts to the National Register of Historic Places within the immediate areas surrounding downtown. The districts include many homes in the characteristic period styles of Colonial Revival, Tudor Revival, French Eclectic, and the less common Spanish Revival; typically built in Tyler in the late 1920s and increasingly during the East Texas Oil Boom's accompanying construction boom. As the East Texas Oil Boom intensified, Tyler felt the effects as people of nearly all walks of life arrived in town, through which a distinction developed between “natives” and “boomers.” Before the subsequent housing construction boom, garage apartments, extra rooms, and all sorts of arrangements were rented out to house “boomers.” Many newcomers stayed at the newly constructed Blackstone Hotel, its lobby having served as a temporary field headquarters for many early East Texas oil ventures.

Oilmen began to take renewed interest in the area in late 1920s. Before that time any talk regarding business circulating about Tyler would have concerned agriculture or manufacturing perhaps, but rarely would anyone have taken seriously any talk of oil in the area. However, that was changing by 1927 with the discovery of the Boggy Creek Field about twenty eight miles southwest of Tyler . Interests were then further peaked by the discovery of Van Zandt Field in October 1929 twenty six miles to the northwest of Tyler . By that time reports of wells “coming in” were a daily occurrence in Tyler news as local wells produced more than 100,000 barrels a month. However, these petroleum finds were minor compared to those yet to be discovered. C. M. “Dad” Joiner struck the initial successful well in October 1930 near Overton, leading to East Texas Field's discovery in early 1931. The events that followed proved more monumental for the region than any before, starting a ripple effect of wealth which bolstered the East Texas region during the darkest days of the Great Depression.

Petroleum speculation in the late 1920s and the discovery of the East Texas Field in 1931 became the catalysts for a wave of significant growth, both commercial and residential, which shaped the cultural landscape created in Tyler during the 1930s. Many of the homes in the historic residential area on the immediate outskirts of downtown Tyler represent a time when the region enjoyed immense growth during a seemingly unlikely period in history. According to East Texas historian James Smallwood in his two volume History of Smith County, Texas , “[From 1930 to 1932] Tyler increased one-square mile in size as workers built 300 new residences and 650 other structures.” By 1940 the city approximately doubled in population size and property valuation. Tyler at the center of several petroleum yielding geologic formations, was a logical location for the industry's field offices and main headquarters for some companies. The centrally located city of Tyler was the most metropolitan of all the cities in and around the regional oil field, and therefore also best suited oil company men and their families coming from places such as Dallas , Houston , and Tulsa .

ABOUT THE ETHA JOURNAL

The constitution of the East Texas Historical Association stipulates that "The Association shall publish at least once a year a historical journal of high quality, to be known as the East Texas Historical Journal , and may publish other items on occasion when judged by the Board of Directors to be worthy and appropriate. Pursuant to that stipulation, the Association publishes the East Texas Historical Journal biannually.

Potential articles should be submitted electronically to Scott Sosebee, editor at sosebeem@sfasu.edu as well as a hard copy mailed to East Texas Historical Association, PO Box 6223 , SFA Station, Nacogdoches , TX 75962. Ideally, they should be 25-35 pages in length, endnotes cited in The Chicago Manual of Style format, and be on any aspect of East Texas history, broadly defined.

The Journal is a peer-reviewed publication and a research-based publication. If you wish to receive a copy of the style sheet or have any questions, direct all communication to sosebeem@sfasu.edu