Texas Girl Becomes a Star
Growing up in Weatherford, twenty-five miles west of Fort Worth, Mary Virginia Martin loved to mimic movie stars—dancing and acting like Dick Powell’s co-star, Ruby Keeler and singing like the crooner Bing Crosby. Martin’s mother, a violin teacher, had planned to have a son in 1913. Instead, her lively little girl became the family’s tomboy, […]
Memories of a Pioneer Woman
Thanks to the stories that Elizabeth Owens told her daughters, we know about life in South Texas during some of its most turbulent times Elizabeth was two years old in 1829 when her stepfather, James Quinn, moved the family from New Jersey to Texas as part of McGloin-McMullen’s Irish Colony. While the group of fifty-three […]
Tough Pioneer Woman
School children often read that Jane Long was the “Mother of Texas.” She was a courageous woman who followed her husband when he led a group of filibusterers intent on freeing Texas from Spanish rule. However, many Native American, Mexican women, and several English- speaking women came to Texas before Jane Long arrived in 1819. […]
NORRIS WRIGHT CUNEY RISES TO POWER AFTER THE CIVIL WAR
Born into slavery in 1846, Norris Wright Cuney did not lead an ordinary slave’s life. His education and other opportunities led the way to his becoming one of Texas’ most powerful black political leaders of the nineteenth century. Cuney’s father, Colonel Philip Cuney, one of the largest landholders in Texas, owned 105 slaves and operated […]
First Lady of the Confederacy
Lucy Pickens was a contradiction—an outspoken, determined, and forceful woman who was ahead of her time and 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 South. She sold her jewels […]
A Mother to the Cowboys
She was called “Mary” by her husband Charles Goodnight, the best-known cattle rancher in Texas. Her distinguished Tennessee family referred to her as “Molly.” And she was known affectionately as “Mother of the Texas Panhandle” by the cowhands she doctored, fed, and counseled. Mary Ann Dyer Goodnight was loved and admired by all. She was […]
SAGA OF A PIONEER WOMAN
The story that places Margaret Leatherbury Hallett in early Texas merits being called a “legend” because not every part of her saga meets the truth test. Born on Christmas Day 1787, she was the youngest daughter of a prominent Virginia family and probably the feistiest. At eighteen she fell in love with John Hallett, a […]
Sam Houston and the Ladies
Before he became the hero of the Battle of San Jacinto and the first president of the Republic of Texas, Sam Houston was the darling of all the ladies, except for one, Anna Raguet. The well-educated Miss Raguet was fourteen in 1833 when she moved with her father from Cincinnati to Nacogdoches, which was still […]
THE MURDER OF DIAMOND BESSIE
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 […]
The Bell With A Past
The bell sitting on a brick platform next to the United Methodist church building in Port Lavaca has a colorful past. Originally, it belonged to the Indianola Methodist Church about nine miles down the coast from Port Lavaca, but a hurricane in 1875 destroyed much of the thriving seaport and most of the church buildings. […]