In his March 24 Galveston County Daily News column, Tom Linton lauded Raiford Stripling, an Outstanding Alumnus of the Texas A&M University College of Architecture, for his role in the 1930’s restoration of a historic church in Goliad, Texas.
On one of his frequent sojourns to Texas state parks, Linton traveled to Goliad State Park and Mission Espiritu Santo State Historic Site. He was taken by the mission’s depression-era restoration, performed under Sripling’s supervision. At the time, he was an architecture student at Texas A&M. The project superintendent, S.C.P. Vosper, was a professor of architecture at Texas A&M.
“Its restoration was based on data obtained from old records of the Catholic Church,” said Linton. “Fortunately for the authenticity in the restoration of the mission, records such as these and other sources of information relating to the architecture of the early Spanish missions were the avocation of the project supervisor of the Mission Espiritu Santo restoration.”
After graduating from Texas A&M in 1931, Stripling stayed in College Station and helped design many of the buildings on the A&M campus. He went on to found his own practice, Raiford Stripling Associates, in San Augustine, Texas.
Stripling’s archives were donated through the College of Architecture’s Center of Heritage Conservation to the Cushing Library at Texas A&M. The CHC received a grant of $40,000 from The Summerlee Foundation to facilitate the completion of this donation, and ensure that these documents become a resource for future generations of historians and preservationists.
Additional information on Stripling can be found in the Fall 2008 archone. newsletter.
Linton’s column, “You Find a Lot of Unexpected Things in Goliad,” is available online.
