Museum unearths documents from old Newcastle mine
BY GINA KEATING | EDITOR
The Young County Museum of History and Culture can digitize 115-year-old pay ledgers from the Belknap Coal Company in Newcastle while Commissioners decide whether to let the museum keep the historical documents that were donated to the County by a local family.
Former County Judge John Charles Bullock, head of the Young County Historical Commission, asked the Commissioners at their Nov. 27 meeting to postpone giving the books to the new museum in Graham, whose mission is to document life in Young County.
The Belknap Coal Company sank a shaft in 1908 and delivered its first car of coal to Wichita Falls later that year, the Texas Historical Commission said.
At issue is how and when these records came to be in possession of the Young County Clerk, Judge Bullock said because the ledgers were “can’t be donated.”
Judge Win Graham said the ledgers “were not a public record. It was a family who donated them to the County because they didn’t know what they wanted to do with them.”
Judge Graham said he was “concerned about the precedent” of parceling out historical County documents to different institutions. “Historians come and look at them,” he said. “I’m not in favor of giving them away.”
He suggested allowing the Young County Museum of History and Culture to make copies of the ledgers to take them on a loan.
Museum co-founder Shannon Potts said the ledgers have important historical value. “Most people coming to the County don’t know there were coal mines in Newcastle,” she said. “We feel like we could preserve the documents. [They] are starting to deteriorate.”
Museum collections manager Tony Widner said the ledgers would be more publicly available at the new museum at 401 Echo St. in Graham, and if the museum shuts down, “everything reverts back to the County.” The Commissioners voted unanimously to allow the Museum to keep the ledgers for three months to digitize them, and to contribute $100 toward the costs for supplies to digitize them.