Haley Memorial Library and History Center
The purpose of the Nita Stewart Haley Memorial Library and J. Evetts Haley History Center is to preserve our western heritage. The Library houses more than 25,000 books, manuscripts and other printed material documenting western history. The collections and programs of the Library and the History Center concentrate on the common threads between the cowboy, the range cattle industry, military and railroads. Each industry depended on the other in order to expand. The settlement of the West could not have occurred without these elements co existing and growing together.
Our mission is to provide a first-class, actively used research facility for aspiring and professional historians and writers. To this end, librarians and archivists on staff continually catalog, preserve and organize the collection in order to facilitate any researcher's task. Many eminent historians, novelists and writers have written books, screen plays and articles based on material found only within the Haley Library collections.
"The information, first-hand, of what happened is not available anywhere else'" notes historian Dudley Cramer whose recent book on the notorious Pecos and Lincoln County War derived from research at the Haley Library.
Historian Robert Utley also relied up research at the Haley Library for his highly acclaimed book on Billy the Kid.
Patrick Dearen's several books on the forbidding Pecos River area of West Texas depended on original historical records found exclusively at the Library.
Prolific western novelist Elmer Kelton credits the Haley Library materials for inspiring many of his books.
The bulk of the Library's primary historical sources, however, remain to be utilized by historians and writers who will disseminate this rich western history to students and the general public. J. Evetts Haley interviewed almost 700 Southwestern pioneers personally. These resources provide an exceptionally fertile, meaningful historical insight. Who knows how many fascinating histories, dynamic biographies and screenplays lie within these hundreds of interviews. With added financial resources, the Haley Library plans to stimulate increased research on the archival materials by publicizing Library holdings through electronic media, creating award programs for writers and expanding the Library's capability for publishing.
Established in 1976, this remarkable institution has endured the test of time. Offered in the collections are printed and manuscript materials on western exploration, frontier military history, early railroads, the development of ranching and farming, mining, politics, frontier social history and material on regional and local Texas histories.
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