Rachel Whitfield, Free Woman
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. How did […]
The Cattle Baron’s Daughter
An elegant 1930s Greek revival temple in Victoria, the Royston Nave Museum, has a story to tell of vast wealth, cultural challenge, creative genius, and high living as broad as the Texas landscape. In 2012, the Nave Museum held a month-long exhibit titled “The Cattle Baron’s Daughter and the Artists Who Loved Her—James Ferdinand McCan […]
A Woman Who Paved the Way For Today
After Minnie Fisher graduated at the age of nineteen with a degree in pharmacy from the University of Texas Medical School in Galveston, she discovered on her first job that she did not earn half the wages of the less-educated male employees. She claimed that remembering that experience in 1901 led to her life’s work […]
Tough Victorian Lady
Lucy Ann Thornton was a bundle of contradictions—a lady ahead of her time who believed women should be educated also touted the need for women to hold home and family above all else. Born into an old southern family in Kentucky in 1839, the barely five-foot-tall Lucy enjoyed a genteel education in the classics […]
Ladies Fought the Second Battle of the Alamo
The second battle of the Alamo began in the early 20th century as a disagreement between two powerful women over the proper way to preserve the Alamo. The old complex had been allowed, after the famous battle in 1836 and the slaughter of the men who fought there, to fall into an embarrassing state of […]
Immigrant Creates a Food Tradition
In 1892 when Adelaida and Macario Cuellar left their impoverished home, crossed the Rio Grande, and were married in Laredo, they had dreams of working hard and finding success. They did not imagine that their family would eventually head a multi-million dollar food business. The Cuellars spoke very little English and worked on farms in […]
TEXAS’ LADY CANNONEER
Texans love stories of pioneer settlers and heroes. Angelina Eberly fits the bill. Born in Tennessee in 1798, Mrs. Eberly married her first cousin, made the journey to Matagorda Bay on the Texas coast in 1822 and finally, with the help of several slaves, opened an inn and tavern in the new village of San […]
A Woman Before Her Time
Jane McManus Storm Cazneau was born in Troy, New York, in 1807, but after a failed marriage and being named in Aaron Burr’s divorce, she came to Texas in 1832 with her brother Robert McManus in an attempt to improve the family’s shrinking fortune. Although she received a contract from the Mexican government to settle […]
Lady Trail Driver
She buried three husbands and then hit the cattle trail in 1873 with her children and a grandchild in tow. Margaret Heffernan was born in Ireland, and when she was five years old, two Irish empresarios went to New York to recruit newly arrived immigrants to settle on their land grant in South Texas. In […]
Housewife Governor
Society in 1924 expected women to stay at home, run the household, raise the children, and follow the lead of their husbands. In that atmosphere Miriam A. Ferguson became the first female governor of Texas. She ran her campaign while maintaining that she was just a little homemaker, and that when she was elected, her […]