The Price Daniel Home at Liberty, Texas on the grounds
of the Sam Houston Library and Research Center
This month my wife Vicki and I made a visit to the Sam Houston Regional Library and Research Center, located at Liberty, Texas, the hometown of former Texas Governor Price Daniel. (At upper left, the Center's Director Robert L. Schaadt welcomes us to his office; upper right, Vicki Cummins is researching in the reading room; lower right, archivist Darlene Mott stands in the stack area of the collection.) This important research center, which is a branch of the Texas State Archives, is located on the grounds of the late Governor Daniel’s home place. His grand southern-style mansion, now a museum open to the public, stands nearby to the modern research building which holds the library and archival collections. The name of facility honors Sam Houston, from whom the governor’s wife Jean Daniel descended. The library holds over four thousand volumes dealing with Texas history, while the archival collection consists of some 16,000 cubic feet of manuscript holdings from over 400 different collections, mostly dealing with the history of southeast Texas. The two largest collections consist of the Governor Price Daniel Papers and the papers of Texas Congressman Martin Dies, who served in the House of Representatives from 1931 to 1944 and again from 1953 to 1958. The collection also includes a number of public records from county governments in southeast Texas along with the manuscript holdings of various families, individuals, and businesses important to that region. The library building, which opened in 1977, provides a pleasant place for library and archival research. Vicki and I spent a rewarding day researching the career of Liberty, Texas artist Watson Neyland, whose papers the library holds.
