Before the discovery of oil and the advent of Progressivism to Texas, the state dealt with prison overcrowding by leasing convicts and their labor to private industry and funneling the profits into the state's coffers. In this book, Donald R. Walker examines economic, social, and political aspects of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Texas that resulted in the leasing system and its eventual demise.
Convict leasing resulted in high mortality rates among prisoners, and stories of abusive guards and intolerable conditions were common. Blacks, who lacked social standing, legal...

In August, 1841, Thomas Gibbs and Gardner Coffin, two itinerant merchants traveling from the states of the American South, arrived in the Republic of Texas and opened a small frontier general mercantile in the recently-established settlement of Huntsville. From that date to the present, members of the Gibbs family residing in Walker County have operated their business interests from the same location on the courthouse square. Being in continuous operation for well over a century and a half permits the Gibbses to claim with justifiable pride that theirs is the oldest business in the state....