Sources and methodEvery source behind the claims

What this site will not sayAnd why

• That Tyler grows half the nation’s roses today.

  The sources give “more than half” for the 1940s and for the early 1960s. It is written in the past tense, always, and the Handbook of Texas says Tyler no longer grows half.

• One share of the nation’s roses.

  The sources give shares from one-fifth to two-thirds, each for its own year and its own measure (bushes grown, sold, demanded). Each is attributed and dated, and none is joined to another.

• That a peach blight “made” Tyler the Rose City.

  The Handbook of Texas says a peach blight led many Tyler-area farmers to grow roses. We attribute that to the Handbook and go no further.

• A year for the peach blight.

  The sources date the orchards’ collapse differently, from before 1906 to a second blight from 1918 to 1920. The story sets the four answers side by side.

• Who worked the rose fields, by race or ethnicity.

  The sources found do not record it. A 1995 article describes generations of budders without saying who they were; the story says so. The Rose Garden nomination’s statement on segregation is quoted in its own words.

• One official title.

  Titles in print run from “the rose capital of the world” (1929) to “Rose Capital of the United States” (2018). The site’s own name is a label, not a claim about a title.

• A single count of the Rose Garden’s bushes, or a single size.

  Counts from 1952 to 2026 run from 3,000 to more than 38,000 and back to about 15,000, and the acreage runs from 11.7 to 22 depending on who measured what. Each is given with its date and source.

• Married names, families or hometowns on the roll of queens.

  The roll gives a name, a year and a title, as the lists print them; where they spell a name differently, both are shown. A middle name found only on Wikipedia is left out.

• That a photograph shows something its record does not.

  The Library of Congress titles Carol M. Highsmith’s 2014 photographs “Tyler Rose Festival,” but they are dated May 18 and the festival is held in October, so they are captioned as the Rose Garden. No photograph of the festival with a usable license was found for any year before 2014.

• How the 93rd festival went.

  The festival facts were checked before it opened. After October 18 the festival pages say only that its dates have passed.

• That a drawing shows a particular place.

  The rose bed in plan is a rose bed, not a map of the Municipal Rose Garden; the circle of ten miles marks a distance, not where the source measured from.

From the shared fact corpus’s do-not-claim list: “Tyler grows half the nation’s roses” in the present tense.

Every source74 sources behind 273 facts

Grouped by publisher. Each source lists the fact ids it supports on this site.