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TEXAN SANTA FE EXPEDITION

Mirabeau B. Lamar

When Texas was a Republic––a country all its own––the second president, Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar had plans as grand as his name. He had organized the Philosophical Society of Texas before his election and he planned to lay the foundations for Texas to become a great empire. The problem was that the United States was the only country that recognized Texas independence. Mexico…

FIRST MAN TO FLY IN AN AIRPLANE?

Always interested in mechanics and inventing, Jacob Brodbeck tried––apparently without

Jacob Brodbeck

success––to build a self-winding clock while he was teaching school in his native Württemberg, Germany. In 1847 he arrived in Fredericksburg to serve as the

Original Vereins Kirche in Fredericksburg

second teacher at the Vereins Kirche and then taught at other schools in Gillespie County. He…

ANCIENT PEOPLES FOUND IN TEXAS

A discovery forty miles north of Austin, known as the Gault Site, tells the story of hunters

Gault Site

and gatherers who lived 16,000 to 20,000 years ago, which makes them older than the Clovis People thought to have been the first in the New World. The Gault Site offered a perfect locale in a wooded valley near several springs feeding a creek where limestone outcrops provided high-quality flint…

Great News! WATERS PLANTATION, the long-awaited sequel to THE DOCTOR’S WIFE and to STEIN HOUSE  is available. It follows many of the characters from both books who move from the Indianola seaport to Washington County, Texas, and continue their story during the political turmoil that builds after Reconstruction.

WATERS PLANTATION, my tenth book, is historical fiction. It will be available on…

SHE DID IT HER WAY

Born in 1892, when females were not expected to have a career, Waldine Amanda Tauch received encouragement to draw from her father who was a photographer. He allowed her to copy his photographs. In an interview conducted in the early 1980s, Waldine said that the

Waldine Amanda Tauch, Wikipedia

day before she started school in Schulenberg, someone showed her an ivory bookmarker. She was so taken…

GERMANS IN THE TEXAS WILDERNESS

A group of German noblemen known as the Adelsverein, promoted the huge wave of German immigrants that began landing on Matagorda Bay in 1844. Some of the early arrivals remained on that barren strip of shell beach and established a port that became Indianola.

Fisher-Miller Grant

Most of the emigrants moved inland and created settlements such as New Braunfels and then Fredericksburg.

Dr. Ferdinand…

“Don’t Sell A Woman Short”

Birdie Harwood, ready for a parade.

The Burnet County Historical Commission tells a tale that’s worth repeating. Ophelia Geraldine Crosby Harwood won the election for mayor of Marble Falls on April 2, 1917, three years before women received the right to vote. The all-male electorate gave her seventy-nine votes to defeat a popular local rancher’s thirty-three votes.

When she was born in 1872, the…

Mary, A Texas Maverick

She came to Texas as the young wife of a powerful man, and the diary she kept of her travels and her life in the growing republic has captured historians and lovers of Texas history. Mary Ann Adams Maverick (1818-1898) was born on a plantation in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama. She attended a nearby boarding school and when she was eighteen, she met thirty-three-year-old Samuel Maverick––a…

THE BLIND MAN’S TOWN

In 1854 Adam Rankin Johnson, a twenty-year-old from Kentucky settled in Burnet County on the edge of the western frontier. He fought Indians, which could be expected since he worked as a surveyor and Indians believed the surveyor’s compass was the instrument that

Adam Rankin Johnson (1834-1922)

was pushing them off the land. In 1854, Johnson stood on the banks of the Colorado River and a dream…

Immigrants Built a San Antonio Icon

The 159-year-old Menger Hotel is the grand dame of San Antonio’s Alamo Plaza, thanks to the hard work of two young immigrants William and Mary Menger. William was one of those younger sons in Germany who didn’t inherit so he became a cooper, making casks and

William Menger Courtesy Menger Hotel

barrels for beer and wine. The twenty-year-old sailed for the United States in 1847 and arrived in San…

The Doctor’s Wife by Myra Hargrave McIlvain

via The Doctor’s Wife by Myra Hargrave McIlvain

TRAINS LOADED WITH ORPHANS

A 1910 Victorian dollhouse is on display at the Heritage Village in Seguin. It belonged to five-year-old Alice O’Brien who arrived in Texas on an orphan train from New York City. She lived only nine months with her new family before the mother died and German immigrants

Dietz Doll House

Dietz and his sister, Miss Mollie, asked the parish priest to allow them to raise Alice in their home. Louis…

The Santa Cruz de San Sabá Mission, built in 1757, is the only Spanish mission in Texas destroyed by Native Americans. The destruction was so complete that it took 235 years for archeologists to finally confirm the site on the banks of the San Sabá River about 120 miles northwest of San Antonio.

Franciscan padres in San Antonio dreamed of constructing a mission in Apache territory and putting an…

DEADLIEST FEUD IN TEXAS

It’s called the Sutton-Taylor Feud, but William Sutton was the only Sutton involved in this fight. He had a lot of friends, including some members of Governor E. J. Davis’ State Police. The Taylor faction consisted of the sons, nephews, in-laws, and friends of two

THE SUTTON-TAYLOR FEUD, Chuck Parsons

brothers––Creed and Pitkin Taylor. The tale gets more complicated: Creed Taylor, who had fought…

Alice Dickerson Montemayor Courtesy Hispanic Life in America

“Are They Real Men?” Alicia Dickerson Montemayor, a Mexican American feminist of the 1930s, actually asked that question in an article in the LULAC Newsin March 1938. Montemayor was challenging what she viewed as gender discrimination and machismo in LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens), the oldest Hispanic civil rights group…

As this country wrestles with the devastating turmoil that has been created by our confused and cruel immigration policies, I have looked at Texas history in search of past leaders who have made hard choices in the face of serious challenges. This post recounts three leaders who had the courage to step forward when our country needed people with strength and character. As you will see, not all of…