Expanding our knowledge of the past

By Russell L. Martin, III, director, SMU DeGolyer Library

In a sense, SMU has collected Western Americana from the day the University opened in 1915. But for most of the 20th century, efforts were not systematic and were subject to the limits of a library budget that was stretched to cover basic materials for the circulating collections, never mind rare materials for special collections. And yet, mostly by gift, some notable acquisitions came our way as early as the 1920s, including octavo editions of Audubon’s Birds of America and Quadrupeds of America from the Elijah Shettles collection, as well as McKenney and Hall’s History of the Indian Tribes of North America as a gift from Peter Hamilton. Also in the 1920s, philosophy professor I.K. Stephens arranged for SMU to acquire the manuscripts of Texas emigrants Edmund Montgomery (and his more famous wife, the artist Elisabet Ney). SMU history professor Herbert Gambrell took a leading part in the establishment of the Dallas Historical Society, and many materials were housed on campus until moving to the Hall of State in Fair Park at the time of the Texas centennial. In 1963, Ella Fondren, the great benefactor of SMU Libraries, established a fund for purchases of Texana as a memorial to honor Angie Frank Smith, Methodist bishop, SMU trustee, and at one time her pastor at St. Paul’s Methodist Church in Houston. The Fondren endowment still supports purchases of books on Texas history for the general circulating collection, but by and large, in the first fifty years of SMU’s existence, rare Western materials were few in number, not readily accessible, and, with several exceptions, not capable of supporting original research.

All of this changed in 1973 when the trustees of the DeGolyer Foundation voted to transfer ownership of the DeGolyer Library and its endowment to SMU. Dallas geologist and oilman E.L. DeGolyer (1886–1956) started collecting books in 1914, when visiting a bookshop in London. His interests were eclectic, including literary first editions, the history of science and technology, the history of business, and most prominently, the history of the American West. After his death, the collection came under the care of the DeGolyer Foundation, with E.L. DeGolyer, Jr. (1924–1977) acting as secretary and director. DeGolyer, Jr. continued to build the collection along the lines established by his father, while also adding a special field of his own, the history of railroads. (Incidentally, we should note that Trevor W. Rees-Jones (1923–2009), the father of Trevor D. Rees-Jones, was held in high esteem by both DeGolyer, Sr. and Jr., serving as the lawyer for the DeGolyer family and foundation and playing a key role in the gift of the DeGolyer Library to SMU).

Numbering roughly 21,000 volumes at the time of Mr. DeGolyer’s death in 1956, today the library holds about 180,000 volumes, over one million photographs, about 2,500 separate manuscript collections, over 3,000 maps, over 4,000 newspaper and periodical titles, and an extensive collection of ephemera. While there will inevitably be some overlap and duplication between the DeGolyer’s holdings and the Trevor Rees-Jones Library of the American West, these are the kinds of problems one is lucky to have! The Rees-Jones Library is comprehensive in its range, ranking by itself as one of the great Western collections in the country, in institutional or private hands. Combined with the DeGolyer, the Rees-Jones Library will only strengthen SMU’s standing as an academic center for the study of Western history.

The two collections will complement and supplement each other in various ways. While the DeGolyer has developed its collections across several subject areas (outlined above), the Rees-Jones Library has focused exclusively on the American West. The relative breadth of the DeGolyer Library is counterbalanced by the great depth of the Rees-Jones Library. The combined holdings will be able to support teaching and research in very specialized areas and also in broader interdisciplinary approaches. While the DeGolyer may have stronger holdings in early voyages and travels, beginning with the Columbus Letter (1493) and including many landmark accounts of the Spanish Southwest during the colonial period, the Rees-Jones Library is much stronger in Western “outlaw” books and cattle trade material, especially brand books, an area where the DeGolyer is comparatively weak. Both libraries already have strong holdings of overland narratives (known to specialists as “Wagner-Camp” materials). These accounts of travel across the Plains and Rockies, 1800–1865, are among the most colorful and vivid descriptions of the Western country, prized by collectors and historians. When we are finally able to catalog and tally the results, we feel confident that we’ll hold at least one edition of almost all of the 690 works that make up the Wagner-Camp universe. In the Rees-Jones collection are some of the rarest railroad items – imprints the DeGolyer has not been able to acquire in many decades of collecting. These “peaks” will soon rise above the broad and extensive valleys of the DeGolyer’s railroad holdings. DeGolyer’s photography collection, already strong with many of the masterworks of 19th-century western photographers, will be enhanced by the arrival of the Rees-Jones Library with its unique jewels, especially its holdings of photographs from the northern plains region, an area not represented in depth by the DeGolyer. In turn, DeGolyer’s holdings of Texas and southwestern photography, especially the Lawrence T. Jones, III Collection, the John Miller Morris Collection and the Michael Heaston Collection of Kansas and the Southern Plains, will extend the usefulness of the Rees-Jones collection. With maps, there will be little duplication between the two collections; instead, there will be the kind of fortuitous extensions that are the delight of specialists. For example, DeGolyer has the 1856 edition of DeCordova’s Map of Texas; Rees-Jones has the 1857 edition. And so it goes.

While the Rees-Jones Library is focused primarily on the pre-1901 period, the DeGolyer Library has, by design and by opportunity, collected 20th-century material. Some of DeGolyer’s business history holdings (Belo Records, Texas Instruments archives, Stanley Marcus’s papers, Mr. DeGolyer’s papers on the oil industry) document the operations of Western enterprises. Western political collections at the DeGolyer include the papers of Congressmen Earle Cabell, James Collins and Sam Johnson. The papers of women are represented in the Archives of Women of the Southwest, from the Civil War diary of Lucy Pier Stevens to the papers of Ebby Halliday, the “First Lady of Real Estate.” DeGolyer’s long-standing interest in Mexican history, especially the Elmer and Diane Powell Collection on the Mexican Revolution, helps to contextualize issues that have effects on both sides of the Rio Grande. Western literary holdings at the DeGolyer range from an anonymous manuscript novel, circa 1860, set in East Texas and written by a woman, to the drafts and typescripts of Texas playwright Horton Foote.

DeGolyer’s ephemera collection is wide-ranging and encompasses a body of material that is often not preserved but is useful for historical research, such as almanacs, broadsides, pamphlets, brochures, trade catalogs, timetables, city directories and bank notes, the Rowe-Barr Texas Currency Collection being a premier example, consisting of thousands of examples, from the Republic of Texas to the Great Depression. The Rees-Jones Library, too, in addition to legendary rarities, also has very extensive holdings of more common material – workaday, ordinary imprints – that, ironically, in the aggregate, are just as valuable for historians. This may be the most promising aspect of the conjunction of these two great collections. SMU will now have not only superb examples of extremely rare (and sometimes unique) materials, but also broad and deep collections of “ordinary” Western imprints, the raw materials of what scholars call “print culture.” Great libraries need both to attract researchers.

Great libraries also benefit from the activities of allied organizations like the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at SMU, which since 1996 has promoted research, publishing, teaching and public programming in a variety of fields of inquiry related to Texas, the American Southwest, and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The travel grants offered to scholars through the Clements Center have brought a host of visiting researchers to the DeGolyer Library over the years. They, in turn, write and publish dissertations, articles and books based on their work in residence. With the coming of the Rees-Jones Library, this activity should only increase.

Fifty years after the donation of the DeGolyer Library, SMU celebrates another magisterial gift with the arrival of the Trevor Rees-Jones Library of the American West. Prospects for the future appear very bright indeed. As Mr. DeGolyer wrote in 1955, “The truth of the matter is that I am interested in books.… It seems to me that teachers, books and scholars are the fundamentals of a school.” Much has changed since then, but those principles remain. So do Mr. DeGolyer’s books, enlarged over the years and now to be joined by the books in the Rees-Jones Library. For these two great benefactors, we can all be thankful.