User:Deisenbe/sandbox/Texas Confederate Museum

Texas Confederate Museum
The Texas Confederate Museum is a former museum in Austin, Texas, run by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, each of which had a separate collection in the museum.

Its first location, from 1903, was in the northwest room on the first floor of the Texas Legislature. In 1920 it moved to a permanent home in the Old Land Office Building on the Capitol grounds, where it would remain until 1988, when the state told the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Dsughters of the Republic of Texas to vacate. After repair and renovation, the building was given a new function as the Capitol Visitors Center. (The Visitors Center does not publicize that the building was for 71 years a Confederate museum, longer than it housed the Land Office. It receives one sentence in the history of the building, and the only appearance of the word "Confederate" is in the name "United Daughters of the Confederacy" who, with the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, "housed their two museum collections in the former Land Office". An accompanying page of historical photographs shows only a "GLO [General Land Office] exhibit room 1961", although the General Land Office had left the building for good in 1920. Nowhere does it refer to the Texas Confederate Museum. )

The Museum never reopened as it never found a new permanent home; its collections were passed from one institution to another like a hot potato that nobody wanted. From 1988 to 1990, its materials were stored in a warehouse of the Texas State Library and Archives Center. From 1990 to 1992 the collection was held by the Helen Marie Taylor Museum in Waco, but returned to temporary storage for two years. In 1994, an agreement with Hill College in Hillsboro placed the collection on display at the Texas Heritage Museum (formerly the Confederate Research Center) until 2000, when the agreement terminated. The collection returned to temporary storage at Baylor University in Waco, where it was inventoried and catalogued. It then was stored in Fort Worth. During this time, items from the collection were loaned to a number of museums.

In 2002, the Haley Memorial Library and History Center in Midland agreed to house and make available to researchers the Museum's paper collection. The rest of the collection is housed at the Texas Civil War Museum in White Settlement, Texas, which opened in 2006. The United Daughters of the Confederacy holds permanently one of the three seats on the Museum's Board of Directors.