Owen set up shop in the old Senate cloakroom, a cramped space borrowed from legislators who had no particular use for it between sessions. He began collecting -- manuscripts, government records, newspapers, anything that documented Alabama's trajectory from territory to statehood and beyond. By 1906, the growing collection earned a promotion to the Capitol's newly completed south wing. But Owen dreamed bigger. In 1918 he proposed a dedicated building, a proper home for what was becoming the most significant collection of Alabama history in existence. He would not live to see it. Owen died in 1920, having spent 19 years building an institution from nothing. The directorship passed to his wife, Marie Bankhead Owen, who would spend the next 35 years making her husband's vision real.

Marie Bankhead Owen was no caretaker director. She ran the department from 1920 until her retirement in 1955 -- one of the longest tenures of any state archives director in American history. When the Great Depression collapsed budgets across Alabama, she saw opportunity where others saw only hardship. She secured funding from the Works Progress Administration, Roosevelt's massive employment program, to construct the standalone building her husband had envisioned two decades earlier. The result was a purpose-built archives facility on Washington Avenue in Montgomery, its entrance graced by bronze doors designed by artist Nathan Glick. Those doors depicted eight scenes from Alabama history, from DeSoto's encounter with Chief Tuscaloosa to the return of World War One heroes. The first and second floors featured walls clad in white Alabama marble quarried from Sylacauga, giving the interior a clean solemnity appropriate to its purpose.

Nathan Glick's entrance doors became the building's signature feature. Each panel told a chapter of Alabama's story cast in relief: the British capture of Mobile, the creation of Alabama Territory, Jefferson Davis taking his oath on the Capitol steps. The doors greeted every visitor who climbed the Washington Avenue steps for decades. Time and the touch of thousands of hands eventually wore the bronze smooth, and the doors were relocated to the Ocllo S. Malone Lobby in the building's newer west wing, where they could be preserved while still being seen. The gesture captures the archives' own mission in miniature -- saving what time erodes, keeping the tangible past accessible even as the original context shifts.

The department has had remarkably few leaders since Thomas Owen founded it. Owen himself served until his death in 1920. Marie Bankhead Owen succeeded him and served until 1955. Peter A. Brannon directed from 1955 to 1967, followed by Milo Howard. Edwin Bridges took the helm in 1982 and served until his retirement in 2012. That continuity -- six directors across more than a century -- gave the institution a consistency rare in government agencies. Each director built on the previous one's foundation. Today the department identifies, preserves, and makes accessible records and artifacts significant to Alabama's history, serving as the official repository for records created by the state's agencies. Other states followed Alabama's model; the first state archives became the template for dozens more.