The Forgotten Texas Census: The First Annual Report of the Agricultural Bureau of the Department of Agriculture, Insurance, Statistics, and History, 1887-1888

A wide-angle portrait of Texas in the 1880s is typically a difficult picture to capture. But a unique government document of more than three hundred pages does it as well as our imagination will allow by providing the statistics and data to make it possible. In 1887, a state bureaucrat - Lafayette Lumpkin Foster - used his position as head of the Department of Agriculture, Insurance, Statistics, and History to create a compendium of wide-ranging information for Texans and people interested in…