Jefferson Morgenthaler is the founder of the Texana Foundation. He serves as one of its two managing directors. He worked as a corporate attorney for 25 years in Denver and Houston. During that time he authored a hardback legal treatise, was the co-author of a multi-volume set of legal references, and published articles in respected legal journals.

In 2002, Morgenthaler changed careers to focus on books. In 2004, the University of Texas Press published his award-winning history, The River Has Never Divided Us. Later that year, he opened Mockingbird Books as a Texana-focused bookstore in Boerne, Texas. Operating the bookstore revealed the need for a local Boerne history, which he wrote and published in 2005.

Finding it difficult to balance writing and retail, in 2007 he closed the bookstore to finish a manuscript that has become Promised Land: Solms, Castro and the Republic of Texas, which is in process at Texas A&M University Press.

His experience as a bookseller and author convinced Morgenthaler that the ranks of Texana publishers were shrinking, and that there was a need for a new publisher of non-fiction about Texas. He reincarnated Mockingbird Books as a publisher, and seeded it with two regional histories that he had been working on. After more thinking, he decided to place the publishing house under the wing of a non-profit corporation dedicated to encouraging interest and excellence in Texas non-fiction.

And so began the Texana Foundation.