The South Texas Archives at the Jernigan Library isn’t limited to the history of Texas A&M University-Kingsville alone. The Archives hold history from all of the surrounding areas.
On Tuesday, March 11, the collection of newspapers from surrounding areas was expanded as issues of the Alice Echo-News Journal dating back to the 1950s were delivered to the repository in the archives.
“It’s exciting. We are actually a repository for 11 counties in South Texas so we already have a pretty big newspaper collection. Alice is one of the ones we were kind of missing a little bit from, and we can digitize that and preserve it and then put it online here for people to come in and read a little bit better,” Bailey Smith, head of Special Collections and Archives, said.
There are a wide range of students who come from surrounding cities and towns, and Alice is one of them. Locals fuel Javelina Nation that’s why it is important to preserve their history and have it as open access.
“So, the history of the Alice newspaper goes back more than 100 years. What this does is it secures the longevity of the history of the community. It’s important that all of those copies of those newspapers are in one repository so that they don’t get lost and the history of the community doesn’t get lost,” Assistant Professor of Practice and The South Texan Adviser Nicole Morris said.
Morris is a member of the Jim Wells County Historical Society and helped secure the move of the archives along with Jim Wells County Clerk J.C. Perez and JWC Historical Society President Tony Bill.
Perez and Bill spent more than a year securing the newspaper collection.
The decision to bring the Alice Echo-News Journal archives to TAMUK was made with an abundance of care for researchers and locals to be able to look back on the history the city of Alice holds and how it was documented.
“Because A&M Kingsville has the facilities and the space to accommodate them, and we want them. We wanted the newspapers to be stored and be available for researchers at the nearest facility or the nearest archives to Jim Wells County, and that would be Texas A&M Kingsville. And I had a personal interest in that. Since I am an alumnus of A&I Kingsville, a 1968 graduate,” Bill said.
