County wants to restore historic documents

GALVESTON — Long before anyone was talking about developing the Ike Dike to protect Galveston Bay from a hurricane, the original designers of the seawall envisioned a looped levee system that would fortify Galveston on all sides.

The blueprints from 1902 that sketch a circular seawall are among 565,000 historical documents the county district clerk’s office is attempting to restore and eventually preserve in a digital database.

“History is at my touch,” assistant district clerk Valerie Millican said. The 25-year-veteran of the district clerk’s office has supervised the cataloging of the documents, many of which date to 1836, since 2005.

“You have to know the subject,” Millican said. “A novice would be lost trying to do this.”

A Trip Back In Time

She admits she gets lost in the history of what she is reading, including an inventory of the items lost in the great Galveston fire of 1885, which destroyed more than 40 blocks of buildings.

“You would see a list of things that people held most dear,” Millican said. “I found it interesting that people were really fond of cherry brandy back then.”

There’s a lawsuit filed in 1836 in which a prisoner complained he was not given a speedy trial because those arrested in Galveston had to wait for a district judge to come to town.

“That may be one of the first right to a speedy trail cases ever filed in Republic of Texas,” Galveston County District Clerk Latonia Wilson said.

The city of Galveston did not have a jail in those days. So, the sheriff would house prisoners in his house as they waited for the judges to come to town.

The records don’t reflect what the sheriff’s wife thought of that arrangement.

There is also letter from Sam Houston, written an 1859, discussing his time as a U.S. senator and talking about democracy in Texas as he prepared for a run as governor.

“You can sit down and read a good book or just come down to the district clerk’s office for something better,” Millican said.

Founding Families And Immigrants

The blueprints of the seawall were part of an eminent domain lawsuit.

A man who owned property on Avenue N between 11th and 12th streets sued the contractor building the seawall. The contractor had — under authority from the county — put rail lines on the man’s property to get supplies to the construction site.

On Sept. 21, 1903, the 10th District judge ordered J.M. O’Rourke and Co. to pay property owner John A. Johnston $319 ($7,519 in today’s dollars) for “taking” his land without permission.

Most of the historical documents are court records that have been stored anywhere the county could find space.

Some of the items include evidence from criminal cases. There are coins from a gambling raid and items from the trial of a black police officer who was murdered by a former police officer.

The list of those who testified at the trial — at a time when Galveston had a separate black police force — included members of the prominent Sealy and Kempner families.

There are also 27,000 pages of immigration records bound in books, including Thomas Corbett’s entry into the United States from Birrin, Ireland, in 1925. The express messenger initially had come to the country through New York before moving to Texas to be with his bride, who was 12 years younger than the 34-year-old Irishman.

History At Risk

Wilson had pushed for a general cataloging of the historic records when she took office five years ago. When Hurricane Ike struck the county in 2008, many of the records — including letters written by Sam Houston — were at risk of being lost forever.

Wilson wasn’t alone.

Other district clerks and the Texas Supreme Court created the Texas Court Records Preservation Task Force to launch a statewide effort to catalog, restore and preserve records from 1836 to 1920.

Wilson, along with state Rep. Craig Eiland, of Galveston, state Sen. Joan Huffman, of Houston, and Galveston Historical Foundation Executive Director Dwayne Jones are part of the 19-member task force created in the fall.

Before there was a task force, Wilson and her director of governmental affairs, Clyde Lemon, lobbied the Texas Legislature to provide funding for the project. Lemon had been part of a massive historical restoration and cataloging project at the Harris County District Clerk’s office before going to work for Galveston County.

While the part of the bill that would have provided direct state funding failed, the Legislature did approve additional court fees of up to $10 to file lawsuits with the county, with those funds earmarked for preserving records. Wilson received approval from county commissioners to charge $8 per lawsuit.

“It’s important to preserve this history, not just because it is interesting, but because it may apply to situations we have today,” Wilson said.

Seeking Help

So far, the district clerk’s office has collected $5,000 from those fees and recently received a $5,000 donation from the Galveston Bar Association. That’s a ways off from the estimated $2.9 million it will take to preserve and digitize the county’s 595,000 historical records. The fee eventually is supposed to go to preserve the not-so-historic documents — meaning anything after 1920.

Wilson said she hopes to convince law firms and families with deep roots in the county to donate to the effort.

That would include Mills Shirley, the oldest continuous law firm in Texas. It was founded in the 1840s when Galveston was the largest city in the state. Many of the court records reviewed by The Daily News were cases handled by Mills Shirley, including dozens of filings on behalf of railroad companies.

Wilson said she also hopes to establish a historic records reading room, where history buffs can see history firsthand. Such a room would likely be at the old county jail, which is to be converted into a document preservation center.

All of the records will be scanned into a computer database so copies can be made and so history lovers from anywhere in the world can access the records online.

+++

By The Numbers

Galveston County historic records

PERIOD: 1836-1920

JUDICIAL BOOKS: 486

IMMIGRATION BOOKS: 95

COURT CASE DOCUMENTS: 384,580

PAGES TO BE RESTORED: 565,027

Costs to restore and archive

RESTORE PAGES: $2.627 million at $4.65 a page

REPAIR BOOK COVERS: $232,400

SCAN PAGES FOR ONLINE: $73,454

TOTAL: $2.933 million

SOURCE: Galveston County District Clerk’s Office