Emma Edmondson, Union Spy
Born in 1841 as Sarah Emma Evelyn Edmondson, the future spy grew up as the youngest of five children on her family’s farm in New Brunswick, Canada. To please her father, who apparently wanted a son, Emma dressed and worked on the farm like a boy. When she faced an unwanted, arranged marriage in the […]
Former Texas Slaves Serve in the Union Army
Three Holland brothers—Milton, William, and James—were slaves born in the 1840s on Spearman Holland’s plantation near Carthage. Apparently their father was Spearman’s half brother, Capt. Bird Holland who purchased his sons from Spearman and moved them to Travis County. Little is known of their early life except that Bird Holland freed his three sons in […]
Houston’s Civil War Hero
A handsome, redheaded Irish saloonkeeper lead a group of forty-six Irish dockworkers in a Civil War battle that Jefferson Davis called the most amazing feat in military history. At the outbreak of the war, Richard “Dick” Dowling, joined the Davis Guards, and soon became the company’s first lieutenant. After gaining a reputation for its artillery […]
BELLE BOYD, CONFEDERATE SPY
At the beginning of the Civil War, 17-year-old Marie Isabella (Belle) Boyd hardly fit the image of a daring spy. She had graduated Baltimore’s Mount Washington Female College and enjoyed a Washington debut. Family stories abound about the lively, oldest child in the family of eight siblings, growing up as a tomboy climbing trees and […]
Going to the Poor House in Texas
The dream of finding a new life, the belief that if a man worked hard, he could “make it,” drove settlers by the thousands to the cheap land in Texas. If illness, death of the breadwinner, drought or crop failure forced a family into poverty, they and their neighbors believed that the need to accept […]
He Came to Texas Seeking Revenge
It’s hard to know what’s truth and what’s myth about the adventures of William Alexander Anderson Wallace. He was a nineteen-year-old working in his father’s Virginia fruit orchard in 1835 when he heard that his brother and a cousin had been killed in the Goliad Massacre during the Texas War for Independence from Mexico. That […]
Manifest Destiny Marches Across West Texas
The end of the Mexican-American War in 1848, fulfilled the dreams of manifest destiny for many citizens and politicians as the United States acquired the land belonging to Mexico that stretched all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The following year, gold was discovered in California and the rush was on. Forts had to be […]
Black History Month–Part IV
Black women have received little attention for the critical role they have played in maintaining their families and contributing to their communities. After running across a brief reference to Rachel Whitfield (1814-1908) a “former slave who made it on her own as head of a household, subsistence farmer,” I began searching for more. I found […]
Black History Month Part II
Many slave families were sold and ripped apart by white slave owners as easily as if they were selling purebred puppies. When Matilda Boozie Randon was a child in South Carolina, her mother and siblings were sold and she never saw them again. Matilda was sold to a family that brought her to Texas, settling […]
Queen of the Confederacy
Lucy Pickens’ life was a contradiction—she was an outspoken, determined, and forceful woman who was ahead of her time, and she was a southern-belle, a beauty, and a charming hostess who was very much a part of her time. She graced the stage of the Russian Czar and Czarina and the grand plantations of the […]