Federal Archives Are Treasure Trove
3/21/91
DALLAS-Housed in an old Army depot in Fort Worth is the stuff of which history is made: paper, and lots of it.
An informal promissory note from Alamo defender James Bowie and a letter from pirate Jean Laffite are among the documents locked inside the federal government's Southwest Regional Archives building.
The 1820 letter penned by the renegade Laffite allows a schooner captain safe passage through his Gulf Coast territory.
Also in the collection of records from a five-state region is a document showing Razin Bowie, a brother of Texas statesman Jim, paid a debt by selling four slaves.
The archives building is adjacent to the Federal Records Center. Together, they can handle 1.2 million cubic feet of documents in a building roughly the size of five Texas Stadium playing fields. But room for the records is tight.
"We're running out of space quickly," said Barbara Rust, who helps maintain the archives.
Compiling and documenting the federal papers, the oldest of which dates back to 1777, is like "working with a jigsaw puzzle," Rust said.
"We usually get records when they're 20 or 30 years or more old and have to figure out who created them, why they were created and if they have any real research value," she told the Dallas Times Herald in Wednesday's editions.