Over the past two decades, TCC’s  student population increased by more than 25,000 hitting the 50,000 mark. Despite the population boom, one of the district’s oldest cornerstones has yet to see the benefit from those gains.

Within that same stretch of time, the Heritage Room on NE Campus, a modest-sized community archive on the bottom floor of J. Ardis Bell Library, which chronicles the history of North Texas, has seen the exact opposite of a boom as its popularity among students has dipped, leaving the archive with a chamber full of artifacts but void of its driving engine.

It’s a grave departure from its previous stature in the 70s and 80s as a must-stop, said district archivist Tom Kellam. In those days, donations poured in and NE history students helped to pump out volumes of history collections including a series on black heritage, which tells the history of local African American communities in Tarrant County after emancipation. Contributions like those helped the repository’s holdings climb to 8,000 items.

Its seminal project is the Records of Mosier Valley, which documents the history of a community just south of Hurst settled by freed blacks in the 1870s.
http://collegian.tccd.edu/?p=41152