Muir, Andrew Forest, 1916-1969.

Andrew Forest Muir was born January 8, 1916 in Houston Heights, Texas. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree (1938) and a Master of Arts (1942) from Rice Institute, as well as a Ph.D. from the University of Texas (1949). While in Austin he taught at St. Luke’s school and tutored English at the University of Texas (1942-44), also serving as acting director of the San Jacinto Museum of History (1943-44). Muir next traveled to Hawaii where, from 1945 to 1949, he worked as a civilian employee for the U.S. Engineers in Honolulu, Hawaii, taught history at the Iolany School, and later was Educational Advisor to the Commanding General at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. He served as an Assistant Professor of History at Daniel Baker College in Brownwood, Texas, from 1951-53, before moving on to teach at the Polytechnic Institute, in San German, Puerto Rico for the 1953-54 academic year. Honored as a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial fellow for 1957-58, he then joined the history department at Rice Institute in 1958.

As a historian, Muir published numerous studies on religion and church leaders in Hawaii during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as several studies on free blacks in the Houston area. He also authored Early Missionaries in Texas (1941), Railroad Enterprise in Texas, 1936-1841 (1944), The Thirty-Second Parallel Pacific Railroad in Texas 1872 (1949), and Thomas Jefferson Ewing, Texas Ward: Politician (1952) as well as Texas in 1837, which he edited in 1958.

Known as an authority on William Marsh Rice, his work William Marsh Rice and His Institute: A Biographical Study was edited by Sylvia Stallings Morris and posthumously published in 1972. In addition, Muir contributed to The Handbook of Texas, Southwestern Historical Quarterly, the Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and the Tennessee Historical Quarterly, and served as associate editor of the Journal of Southern History .

Andrew Forest Muir died on February 3, 1969.

From the guide to the Andrew Forest Muir papers MS 17., ca. 1916-1969, (Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University, Houston, TX)