The Texas Parks & Wildlife Department (TPWD) retains the ship’s collections and archives donated prior to 2020. TPWD has been working to digitize much of their collections. This includes photos, blueprints, and shipboard newsletters, which have been made available online through University of North Texas’s Portal to Texas History.

Battleship Texas Newsletter Collection

Until early 1942, Battleship Texas had a full printshop onboard and the crew produced a weekly newsletter almost continuously in this time. The ship’s newsletters typically focused on shipboard news and often included illustrations by crewmembers. After the printshop was scaled down in early 1942, the newsletter became a simpler production and focused almost exclusively on US & world news. The newsletter collection contains almost 300 issues of the ship’s newsletter, most of them from the 1920s and 1930s.

Battleship Texas Photo Collection

This collection contains over 600 historic photos of Battleship Texas, her crew, captains, admirals, visitors, and more.

Battleship Texas Blueprint Collection

This collection contains over 3,000 blueprints and other documents relating to technical and engineering aspects of Battleship Texas.

These collections are a small fraction of the historic photos and documents relating to Battleship Texas that exist. Most official Navy documents related to the ship are in the National Archives and not digitized. Battleship Texas Foundation is currently working with a researcher to obtain scans of all of the ship’s deck logs, muster rolls, marine rosters, and officer rosters from 1914-1948.

Artifact Donations

Battleship Texas Foundation is actively collecting historic items, photographs, and documents related to Battleship Texas (BB-35) or the other commissioned ships named USS Texas (SSN-775, CGN-39, and the first USS Texas commissioned in 1895). If you have an item that makes you say “It belongs in a museum!” please email us at [email protected] with photos and any relevant information.

Artifacts come in many shapes and sizes, these are some examples of recent donations.

I have an item that I think is Battleship Texas related, but I’m not sure

Send us photos and any relevant information to [email protected] and we may be able to identify it. If we cannot determine with reasonable certainty what the item is or if it is Battleship Texas related, we cannot accept it.

I have an item that I would like to donate, but there would be costs in moving/packing/shipping the item

Depending on the item, we may be able to cover associated costs. Send us photos and any relevant information to [email protected] and we can discuss how to proceed.