Texas School Book Depository
| Texas School Book Depository | |
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Dallas County Administration Building in 2015, formerly the Texas School Book Depository
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 Location within Texas
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| Former names | Southern Rock Island Plow Company Texas School Book Depository |
| Alternative names | Dallas County Administration Building The Sixth Floor Museum |
| General information | |
| Architectural style | Romanesque Revival |
| Location | West End Historic District |
| Town or city | Dallas, Texas |
| Coordinates | 32°46′47″N 96°48′30″W / 32.77972°N 96.80833°WCoordinates: 32°46′47″N 96°48′30″W / 32.77972°N 96.80833°W |
| Elevation | 455 feet (139 m) |
| Construction started | 1901 |
| Renovated | 1981 |
| Cost | $3,040,510 |
| Owner | Dallas County |
| Technical details | |
| Structural system | B-Reinforced Concrete Frame Piers |
| Floor count | 8 |
| Floor area | 80,000 feet (24,000 m) |
| Design and construction | |
| Main contractor | Rock Island Plow Company |
| Website | |
| The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza | |
The Texas School Book Depository, now known as the Dallas County Administration Building, is a seven-floor building facing Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, United States. The building is most notable for its connection to the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. An employee, Lee Harvey Oswald, shot and killed the president from a sixth floor window on the building's southeastern corner. The structure is a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark. It is located at 411 Elm Street on the northwest corner of Elm and North Houston Streets, at the western end of downtown Dallas.
The site of the building was originally owned by John Neely Bryan. During the 1880s, Maxime Guillot operated a wagon shop on the property. In 1894, the Rock Island Plow Company bought the land, and four years later constructed a five story building for its Texas division, the Southern Rock Island Plow Company. In 1901, the building was hit by lightning and nearly burned to the ground. It was rebuilt in 1902 in the Commercial Romanesque Revival style, and expanded to seven stories. In 1937 the property was acquired by the Carraway Byrd Corporation, and after the company defaulted on the loan, it was bought at public auction July 4, 1939 by D. Harold Byrd.
Under Byrd's ownership the building remained empty until 1940, when it was leased by a grocery wholesaler, the John Sexton & Co. Sexton Foods used this location as the branch office for sales, manufacturing and distribution warehouse for the south and southwest United States. In November 1961, Sexton Foods moved to a modern distribution facility located at 650 Regal Row Dallas; by then the building was known locally as the Sexton Building. Refurbishment after Sexton's departure saw the addition on the first four floors of partitions, carpeting, air conditioning and a new passenger elevator.
In 1963, the building was in use as a multi-floor warehouse for the storage of school textbooks and related materials and an order-fulfillment center by the Texas School Book Depository Company. Some time after the company moved in, it was found that the upper floors had sustained oil damage from items stored there by the previous tenant, a wholesaler grocer. To protect the company's books (stored in cardboard boxes) from oil seeping up from the floor, a process was begun to cover the floors with plywood. Immediately prior to the Presidential visit, work had begun on the west side of the sixth floor, "leaving the whole scene in disarray, with stock shifted as far as the east wall, and stacks in between piled unusually high."
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Wikipedia