Texas School Book Depository

The Texas School Book Depository, later known as the Dallas County Administration Building and now "The Sixth Floor Museum", is a seven-floor building facing Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. The building was Lee Harvey Oswald's vantage point during the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald, an employee at the depository, shot and mortally wounded President Kennedy from a sixth floor window on the building's southeastern corner. Kennedy was pronounced dead at Parkland Memorial Hospital.

The building, located at 411 Elm Street on the northwest corner of Elm and North Houston Streets in downtown Dallas, is a Texas Historic Landmark.

The site was originally owned by John Neely Bryan. In the 1880s, Maxime Guillot operated a wagon shop on the property. In 1894, the Rock Island Plow Company bought the land, and four years later constructed a five-story building for its Texas division, the Southern Rock Island Plow Company. In 1901, the building was hit by lightning and nearly burned to the ground. It was rebuilt in 1902 in the Commercial Romanesque Revival style and expanded to seven stories. In 1937, the Carraway Byrd Corporation purchased the property, but they defaulted on the loan. It was sold at public auction in July 1939 and purchased by D. Harold Byrd.

Under Byrd's ownership, the building remained empty until 1940, when it was leased by grocery wholesaler John Sexton & Co. Sexton Foods used this location as the branch office for sales, manufacturing, and distribution for the south and southwest United States. In November 1961, Sexton Foods moved to a modern distribution facility located at 650 Regal Row Dallas. By then, the building was known locally as the Sexton Building. The building was refurbished, and partitions, carpeting, air conditioning, and a new passenger elevator were added on the first four floors.

In 1963, the building was in use as a multi-floor warehouse storing school textbooks and other related materials, and an order-fulfillment center by the privately owned Texas School Book Depository Company, which had moved from the first floor of the adjacent Dal-Tex Building. The company found that the upper floors had sustained oil damage from items stored there by the previous tenant, so they began to cover the floors with plywood to protect their books, stored in cardboard boxes, from the oil.

Work had begun on the west side of the sixth floor just before President Kennedy's motorcade, "leaving the whole scene in disarray, with stock shifted as far as the east wall, and stacks in between piled unusually high." Lee Harvey Oswald was working as a temporary employee at the building. He fired three shots from a sixth floor window at the presidential motorcade on November 22, 1963. At this time, the building had three elevators.

The Texas School Book Depository Company maintained a second warehouse at 1917 Houston, several blocks north of the main building. The short four-story structure was well removed from the parade route, half-hidden on an unpaved section of Houston. Oswald's supervisor Roy Truly told the Warren Commission that he had the option to assign Oswald to either building on his first day at work. "Oswald and another fellow reported for work on the same day [October 15] and I needed one of them for the depository building. I picked Oswald." This second building was eventually destroyed to make way for the Woodall Rodgers Freeway.

According to William Manchester in his book The Death of a President, this warehouse prior to November 22 was "the better known" of the two warehouses.