More about the Trinity River...

In my prior post, I discussed the new book on the history of an important Texas river, the Trinity River, authored by river historian Scott McFarlane. Regarding the rejection by voters in 1973 of the proposal to approve bond funding for the so called "Trinity River Project" that would have canalized the river, here is a personal anecdote that I here record. In September 1973 I was 21, a senior in college at Sewanee, and en route to Tennessee for my senior year I had driven to visit kinfolk in Navarro County, which is bounded on the east by the Trinity River. In the ancestral town of Kerens I attended an evening meeting held in the backyard of my Great Aunt Orleana Daniel Owen that was led by a leader of the Trinity Improvement Association named Bruce Smith. I understood his group to be longtime supporters for canalizing the river. To a couple dozen residents of Kerens seated in chairs arranged in a semi-circle in that backyard, Smith recommended the Trinity River Project, extolled its canal as the needed vehicle for economic development in Navarro County such as facilitating exports of sand and gravel and of the fertilizer being produced by the relatively new Nipak fertilizer plant situated between Kerens and the river on Highway 31, and urged the attendees to vote to approve the Project in an election that would occur in the following spring. I had been opposing the Project for several years, having joined the Dallas-based opposition group known as Citizens Organization for a Sound Trinity ("COST") and having requested and received the multi-volume "draft" Environmental Impact Statement that the Trinity River Authority had issued. It showed that the Project would construct a mid-river flood-control reservoir, to be named Tennessee Colony Lake, that would also be an element of the Trinity River Canal. So that night in the backyard meeting, after Smith completed his campaign speech urging the attendees to vote yes in the bond election, I rose and spoke against the Canal. I asserted that the Canal was not needed and would turn the river into an "ugly ditch." Smith reproved me, stating that "The Canal will be a beautiful thing." He added, "Your granddaddy was in favor of the Project, and YOU should be too!" While voters in Navarro County voted yes, up and down the river and in Dallas voted the bond issue down, and the Project died, fortunately.
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New book: The River that Made Texas: A Forgotten History of the Trinity

Last night in the Texana Room of SMU’s DeGolyer Library, river historian Scot McFarlane presented his book on the Trinity. With the old Daniel family lands being located on the Trinity well downstream of Dallas, it is a topic I knew something about but learned a lot from his well written book. In the Q-and-A Isuggested that he create and edit a similar history of each of the rivers of Texas, so a dozen books for my proposed “Texas Rivers” series, with his on the Trinity the first, based on the model of the 65 books in the “American Rivers” series published from the 1930s to the 1970s by Holt Rinehart & Winston.
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my new article: "Determining the Historiographical Problem of Municipal Bankruptcy: Hatton Sumners and the Enactment and Amendment of Chapter IX, 1933-1979" in 100 American Bankruptcy Law Journal 327

Announcing the publication of new newest article: 


"Determining the Historiographical Problem of Municipal Bankruptcy: Hatton Sumners and the Enactment and Amendment of Chapter IX, 1933-1979"  
100 American Bankruptcy Law Journal 327:
This one was a project over ten years, so I am resting from this labor.....and I wish everybody a good Labor Day.

-Josiah Daniel
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About the discipline of history

The past cannot be recovered, but

let us save what remains, not by

vaults and locks which fence them

from the public eye and use, in con-

signing them to the waste of time,

but by such a multiplication of copies, 

as shall place them beyond the

reach of accident.


-Thomas Jefferson

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The Atlantic's August 2026 article, "The End of Reading is Here" by Rose Horowitch, is sobering

Recent quotation: "There’s a fear among historians, whispered during panels and conferences, that they will be the final generation to systematically examine the past." 

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/?utm_campaign=one-story-to-read-today&utm_content=20260708&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&lctg=6050e76e4c8a1e4095fa69fb&utm_term=One%20Story%20to%20Read%20Today
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my newest publication: "The Affinity of Lawyers & History: The Dallas Bar Association’s Legal History Discussion Group as a Case in Point"

First: —from the website of the Journal of the Texas Supreme Court Historical Society, click on this: www.texascourthistory.org/Content/Newsletters//May%20TSCHS%20Spring%202026.pdf —then on page one click on the hotlinked title of my article: "The Affinity of Lawyers & History: The Dallas Bar Association’s Legal History Discussion Group as a Case in Point"   Second —also available on SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6881519
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I agree with this historian

https://newrepublic.com/article/198354/history-died-sanctioned-ignorance
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