Texas Legation Papers TCU is currently acquiring five-year depository and display rights to the Texas Legation Papers, the official records of the Republic of Texas embassy in Washington DC from 1836 to 1845. When Texas entered the Union and closed its Legation office in 1845, the Legation Papers were catalogued and archived for shipment to Austin. The 266 documents in the collection contain personal letters, financial arrangements, proposals for Texas annexation to the U.S., descriptions of boundary issues, relations with the Indians, relations with Mexico, and the Treaty of Velasco, in which the independence of Texas was secured from Mexico. Left in the care of a clerk in the Washington office of the Texas Adjutant General, the papers remained there until 1859, when Sam Houston, after completing two terms in the US Senate, had the archive shipped back to Texas along with his personal effects. Because of the mixed personal and official nature of the shipment, the Legation Papers were inadvertently delivered to Houston's home rather than to the state archives in Austin. Sam Houston died in 1863. In the press of the Civil War and the confusion of settling his estate, the papers were forgotten and lost. They resurfaced in 2004 in the estate of a private owner. The Texas Attorney General determined that the Legation Papers were official records of the Texas government and must be turned over to the State Library & Archives Commission. First, however, the State Library granted the Texas State Historical Association the opportunity to auction depository and display rights for the collection to a state-approved institution for a period of five years. TCU has acquired these rights through the generosity of Mary Ralph Lowe (TCU class of 1965), the Lowe Foundation, and Houston oilman J.P. Bryan (a descendent of Moses Austin, a collector of Texana, a past president of the Texas State Historical Association, and a past TCU parent), as well as a commitment of University funding. Having been out of view for 161 years, the Legation Papers have never been available to scholars or the general public. Dr. Greg Cantrell, holder of the Erma & Ralph Lowe Chair in Texas History at TCU, has already planned an ambitious agenda of original research, and for the next five years, scholars of Texas and U.S. history from across the country will come to TCU to examine and study this important collection. Access to the papers will boost the work not only of historians, but also of scholars in disciplines that draw on history (political science, sociology, geography, etc.). The University, the Center for Texas Studies, and the Lowe Chair in Texas History will receive a considerable boost in stature and reputation as a result of TCU being a depository for this rare and singular archive. The most interesting and notable items in the collection will be publicly displayed in the Mary Couts Burnett Library.