Long-time faculty member and two-time San Marcos Mayor, Dr. Emmie Craddock was dedicated to preserving history. She and her History students conducted dozens of interviews with members of the community. The subjects of these interviews were often older residents, who talked about their experiences growing up in the 1910s and 1920s.

The Rural Electrification Administration (REA) was created by Congress in the 1930s, offering loans to encourage power suppliers to provide rural America with inexpensive electric lighting and power.  When commercial power companies failed to make use of these loans, locally-owned cooperatives took charge.

The Guadalupe Valley Electric Cooperative (GVEC) was founded on December 2, 1938, by a group of rural residents who needed electricity for their farms.  GVEC serves 13 Texas counties, including parts of Hays, Guadalupe, Comal, and Caldwell. 

In 1986, the board of directors of the Guadalupe Valley Electric Cooperative requested assistance from the history department of Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State) to record the history of their organization. 

Students in Dr. Ron Brown's oral history courses conducted a series of twenty-seven interviews from November 1986 through December 1987. The majority of the interviews were conducted by graduate student Karen Yancy, who used the interviews in her master's thesis, And Then There was Light: A History of Guadalupe Valley Electric Cooperative 1963-1988. 

Many of the interviewees were charter customers and employees of GVEC and remembered a time before electricity was available to the residents of the Guadalupe River Valley.

Graduate student Mary A. Allen began this project as a term paper for Dr. Everette Swinney's graduate historiography class in Fall 1991.  Her initial goal was to interview a few faculty members in hopes of tracing changes within the department.  However, a conversation with Dr. Ron Brown led her to expand the original goal a bit -- and she agreed to transcribe the tapes and to allow them to be made available in the Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State University) archives.

LBJ 100 Oral Histories

2008 marked the centennial of Lyndon Baines Johnson's birth.  As part of the celebration, the University collaborated with the Lyndon Baines Johnson Museum of San Marcos to collect a total of 45 oral histories relating to Johnson's life and legacy.

Forty-nine individuals, interviewed by historian Barbara Thibodeaux, recalled their memories of Johnson. The resulting exhibition, "Remembering LBJ and his Legacy: Local Recollections – An Oral History Project," was displayed at the San Marcos museum from 2008 through 2009. Interviewees included former work associates, college classmates, students who met Johnson during his visits to San Marcos, campus employees and administrators, and other city residents who recalled Johnson's local importance. Note: these transcriptions were edited for nonessential words and conversation for the sake of clarity.

The digital exhibition, Lyndon B. Johnson, linked below, may be a useful resource when reviewing these oral histories. The exhibition explores Johnson's days as a student at SWT (now Texas State University), as well as his lifelong association with his Alma Mater.

As Texas marked its sesquicentennial in 1986, Southwest Texas State University students made their own contributions to celebrating the state’s 150^th year. From 1985–1986, history students in Dr. Ron Brown’s oral history courses interviewed current and former faculty, staff, alumni, and community members from San Marcos and its surrounding areas. The interviewees shared their memories about the university and life in Central Texas, offering a glimpse into the important people, places, and events that define Texas State University and its place in the Lone Star State.