Preservation of Historic Hardin County, Texas, Court Records

FAIN: PG-258351-18

Hardin County (Kountze, TX 77625-5994)
Dana M. Hogg (Project Director: May 2017 to March 2021)

A preservation assessment and the purchase of archival supplies and environmental monitoring equipment for a collection of records documenting local history and the development of Texas’s oil and timber industries.  The Texas Company (Texaco) struck its first productive well in Sour Lake, Hardin County, in 1903.  The collection contains court documents for 24,000 criminal and 58,000 civil cases including hundreds of tri-fold documents, thousands of documents in legal folders, bound volumes of grand jury minutes, civil minutes, tax indices, clerk records of trust funds, judgments, fee sheets, indices of criminal minutes, execution dockets, and docket sheets.  Materials are used for research on genealogy, sociology, political science, criminal studies, legal history, and Texas history.

The Hardin County District Clerk's office maintains 2,300 square feet of records that help tell the story of our county, including information about the history of the beginnings of the oil and timber industry.  These records are stored in an old hospital building in far from ideal conditions, and staff are not knowledgeable about proper care of historic records.  With this grant, we will hire a conservator to perform a preservation assessment of our collection and help us create a preservation plan we can follow for our collection.  We will also purchase supplies to house our collection and monitor the environment.