The History and Development of Irrigated Cotton on the High Plains of Texas, by Joseph F. Gordon , 1961

In 1987, on assignment from Texas Monthly, Dick Reavis traveled every highway mile of Texas, according to the official DOT map (he discovered unmapped roads and stretches of roads during his travels). As a result he wrote articles about his experience, took slide photographs, gathered postcards and souvenirs, and kept meticulous notes on his travels. All these records and more constitute Series II. Reavis divided Texas into 48 regions, and organized almost all his documentation of the tour by these regions, including his notes, slides, postcards and maps. This numeric system has been preserved here.

The series is arranged into four sub-series: Documentation of Tour, which includes postcards, slides, logbooks, maps and notes; Materials About Tour, with correspondence, a scrapbook, souvenirs, press clips and articles, and promotional postcards; and Research, containing a book, dissertation and thesis on Texas.

Just prior to and as the trip got started, newspapers around the state covered the story. The Press Clips folder contains these clippings, and the Correspondence folder has letters from readers who want to give advice or extend invitations before his trip. The logbook, maps and handwritten/typed notebooks should be consulted for the most detailed documentation of the trip.

The full-size maps of Texas—one showing the regions he assigned and numbered, one showing the highways he drove—have been separated from the logbook where they were originally kept so they could be stored flat in an oversize document case. Two empty three-ring binders Reavis used for his notes are kept in box 71 as part of the “Documentation of the Tour” sub-series. The notes themselves are now kept in folders.