Texas Cowboy Churches: a Collection of Oral Histories

The poster exhibits a project that is collaborative in nature, and unique in that it features a small demographic group not widely represented in current research. The project showcases primary resources for researchers in the areas of religion and Western American cultural heritage.

The Center for Digital Scholarship at Stephen F. Austin State University Library manages a variety of collections in its digital repository. The Texas Cowboy Church Oral History Project, a part of the Library’s Oral History Collection, is a unique collection that highlights a selected group of Cowboy Church members and pastors.

The series of interviews and oral histories was conducted by Jake McAdams, a graduate student in the Public History program in the Department of History at SFA. His work preserves the idiosyncratic practices and attitudes of those affiliated with Cowboy Churches in Texas. Jake visited Cowboy Church members in several Texas locales and interviewed them with questions designed to explore their background and feelings regarding religion, and the reasons they selected a Cowboy Church as their religious community. His interviews provide interesting primary source material for the study of a growing religious and cultural phenomenon.

The Center for Digital Scholarship worked with Jake to design and implement the digital presentation of his research project, and created the structural and descriptive metadata for the collection.