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 […]
Angelina Eberly, Innkeeper/Cannoneer
Famous for firing the howitzer that started Texas’ “Bloodless War,” Angelina Eberly was really a smart businesswoman. Born in Tennessee in 1798, Angelina Belle married her first cousin Jonathan C Payton in 1818 and began a journey that ended in 1825 in San Felipe de Austin, headquarters of Stephen F. Austin’s colony. The couple operated […]
Jane Long, Pioneer Texan
School children often read that Jane Long was the “Mother of Texas.” She was a courageous woman who followed her husband as he led a group of filibusters intent on freeing Texas from Spanish rule. However, many Native American, Mexican, and several English-speaking women came to Texas before Jane Long arrived in 1819. Born in […]
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 […]
Peter Pan, A Texas Girl
Growing up in Weatherford, twenty-five miles west of Fort Worth, Mary Virginia Martin was a mimic—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, romping and […]
Flapper Bandit
Just before Christmas in 1926, Rebecca Bradley, a twenty-one-year old student at the University of Texas in Austin, decided to rob banks to pay her college tuition. First, she set fire to a vacant house near downtown Round Rock and rushed into the nearby bank thinking the employees would be distracted by the blaze. When […]
First Lady of the Texas Panhandle
Called “Mary” by her husband Charles Goodnight, the best known cattle rancher in Texas; referred to as “Molly” by her distinguished Tennessee family; and 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 fourteen in 1854 […]
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, which 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 neglect and […]
Lucy Kidd-Key, Tough Victorian Lady
Born into an old southern family in Kentucky in 1839 and given a genteel education in the classics and fine arts, the barely five-foot-tall 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 […]
The Four Gospels Railroad
The twenty-two mile rail line did not begin in 1909 as anything other than a central Texas business scheme to move Williamson County’s huge cotton crops to the Missouri-Kansas and Texas “Katy” Railroad at Bartlett. Granted, farmers and residents along the line were so happy to have a railroad that when the last of the […]