In the early morning hours of February 2013, the Main Street Presbyterian Church in Honey Grove, Texas, was destroyed by fire and with it went hundreds of historical church records.

That blaze prompted the Honey Grove Preservation League to kick their conservation efforts into high gear, said Malinda Allison, vice president of the league and a member of the Fannin County Historical Commission.

“This is the history of our town, and the people here care about it,” said Allison.

They aren’t alone. The University of North Texas University Libraries runs the Texas Digital Newspaper Program to digitally preserve Texas newspapers from all across the state and reaching back decades. The collection is housed on The Portal to Texas History and recently reached a huge milestone by digitizing its five millionth page.

“The Texas Digital Newspaper Program is such an exciting project,” said Mark Phillips, associate dean for digital libraries. “Newspapers are our collective histories, and five million pages is an amazing milestone to reach.”

Those interested in Texas history can go online and read firsthand reports of the war against Mexico, the 1900 Galveston hurricane and writings of Stephen F. Austin. With the program hitting this mark, there is now even more to see.

“We treat newspapers like patches in a quilt that illustrates a community’s identity,” said Ana Krahmer, director of UNT’s digital newspaper unit. “Each newspaper issue completes that community’s quilt over time. As the program moves forward, we will strive to represent Texas in as well-rounded a way as possible by collecting newspapers from additional cultural groups and from more areas in Texas.”

Allison said programs like the Texas Digital Newspaper Program and the Portal itself are so important for preserving the history of communities like hers.

“If anybody even fell off of the porch, or your 20-year-old mule died, it was in the paper. Every time somebody got a new car, it went in the paper. So the social history of the community is all there,” she said. “I now have access to history that I didn’t have before, and it is searchable.”