THE PADRE ISLAND STORY
The treasures of Padre Island, playground on the Texas Gulf Coast, reveal far more than sandy beaches and sand dunes rippling in the steady breeze. Dig beneath the sand castles and you find a legacy of grand visions and broken dreams. Padre, a textbook example of a barrier reef island, edges the Texas coast for […]
POWER BY DESIGN
In the last half of the nineteenth century, the most powerful men in Texas called Galveston home. The Strand, a street stretching five blocks along the docks, wore the moniker of Wall Street of the Southwest. Two-dozen millionaires officed along the route, controlling Texas’ shipping, banks, insurance companies, and the vast cotton export business. One […]
JOHN WESLEY HARDIN, KILLER
Handsome and gentlemanly John Wesley Hardin, named for the founder of the Methodist Church, was the son of a Methodist minister and circuit rider. Perhaps his proper upbringing caused “Wes” to view himself as a pillar of society who claimed he never killed a man who didn’t need killing. The numbers of dead differ, as […]
OBLATE FATHERS OF THE RIO GRANDE
Known as the horseback “Cavalry of Christ” to Mexican ranchers along Texas’ lower Rio Grande Valley, the Oblate Fathers arrived in 1849 to serve as Texas missionaries. The padres, young men from large cities in France, wore plain black soutanes resembling ankle-length, long-sleeved dresses with an Oblate cross hung around their necks. Experiencing a steep […]
THE SANCTIFIED SISTERS
Scorned, ridiculed, and later admired, they operated the only known woman’s commune in the U.S., and they were serious capitalists in an age when women enjoyed few rights. The Sanctificationists owed their beginning to Martha McWhirter, who with her husband George and their twelve children moved into Belton in Central Texas after the Civil War. George […]
DIAMOND BESSIE MURDER TRIAL
Jefferson, a thriving inland port in deep East Texas, enjoyed a cosmopolitan air of success in 1877. Steamboats designed to carry a thousand bales of East Texas cotton on only three feet of water left the port of Jefferson and returned from New Orleans with the latest fashion in clothing and home design as well […]
ANGEL OF GOLIAD
Many stories survive from the 1836 War for Texas Independence from Mexico, but several almost forgotten tales surround the deeds of a beautiful young Mexican woman whose name is shrouded in the mists of history. To a person they called her the “Angel of Goliad.” She steps onto the scene as the woman accompanying Capt. […]
SHANGHAI PIERCE, A FAIR LIKENESS
It is unusual for a cattleman to come to Texas as a stowaway on a ship. But that is exactly how 19-year-old Abel Head Pierce made his way to Port Lavaca in 1854. Discovered when the ship reached the high seas, he earned his passage by mopping the deck and hauling cargo at ports-of-call along […]
LOS EBANOS FERRY
Named for the ebony trees in the area and for the tiny town hugging Texas’ southern border, this ancient crossing on the Rio Grande serves as the only government-licensed, hand-operated ferry between the U.S. and either its Mexican or its Canadian border. For years before Spain began issuing land grants on the Texas side of […]
THE LADY WITH THE PEN
Elise Tvede Waerenskjold (1815-1895) marched to her own drummer in both Norway and Texas. The daughter of a Norwegian Lutheran pastor, Elise was a women’s advocate when feminists were unheard of in Norway. After a genteel education at home by private tutors, she became a teacher, a rare move for a woman at that time. […]