Women's History

Eatonton, GA

Eatonton's Bronson House grew from an 1816 tavern into an elegant Greek Revival mansion, remodeled by 1852 with twelve fluted Doric columns by carpenter-architect James M. Broadfield. Over the decades it served as an inn, a hotel, a private residence, and finally a boarding house, passing through the hands of planters, a U.S. marshal, and railroad agent Emerson Bronson. His widow Nena and later her descendants carefully preserved its architecture before the family gave it to the county historical society in 1985.

Beaumont, TX

Beginning as the Woman's Reading Club, the Woman's Club of Beaumont built this two-story frame clubhouse in 1909, one of the earliest meeting halls in the area, complete with an auditorium, stage, and space for cultural collections in support of local libraries. It hosted everything from the Oil Producers Association's first banquet to a piano ensemble equipped with four grand pianos. During both world wars the members turned it over to Red Cross work, rolling bandages and gathering supplies.

Mason, TX

German immigrant Anna Mebus came to Texas in 1858, married her merchant cousin, and after his death ran their Mason store and post office while quietly handling the cash of area ranchers. In 1901 she helped found The Commercial Bank and became its president, opening with just three thousand dollars in capital and, before a bank building was secured, carrying the money home each night for safekeeping. With her sons as officers, she led a family bank that endured until 1958.

Paducah, KY

When Confederate forces occupied nearby Hickman and Columbus in the summer of 1861, hopeful Paducahans raised a large Confederate flag to welcome a Southern army they believed was on its way. Instead, General Grant's Union troops, backed by gunboats, moved to occupy Paducah on September 6. As seizure loomed, Mrs. Emily Jarrett rushed to save the banner, having a boy climb the pole to drop it to her, and hid it from searching Union soldiers—keeping it until it was buried with her decades later.

Galveston, TX

In 1891, in this Victorian building that served as the library of "The Oaks" family home, Betty Ballinger and Hally Bryan founded the Daughters of the Republic of Texas to preserve the state's history. The two women were descendants of William H. Jack, a soldier at the 1836 victory at San Jacinto and an official of the Republic. The society's first president was the widow of Anson Jones, the last president of the Republic of Texas.

Fort Worth, TX

What began in 1887, when the Rev. Isaac Z.T. Morris and his wife took orphaned children into their own Fort Worth home, grew into the Texas Children's Home & Aid Society, chartered in 1904 to place children in adoptive families. Edna Gladney joined as a director in 1910 and became its crusading superintendent, championing unwed mothers and foundlings and pushing landmark social legislation. Her fame reached Hollywood in the 1941 film "Blossoms in the Dust," and the home was renamed in her honor in 1950.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2024

Ona Judge was brought to Philadelphia as an enslaved servant of Martha Washington while the city served as the young nation's capital. In May 1796 she slipped away from the President's House and made her way to New Hampshire, aided by Philadelphia's free Black community. Even the president's efforts to reclaim her failed, as federal officials declined to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act on his behalf, and Judge lived out her life in freedom.

Jefferson, TX

This modest Greek Revival cottage went up in the 1850s for Bartholomew Figures, a local innkeeper, and passed through a long line of short-term owners over more than a century. Among them was dressmaker Mary Eglentine Whitfield, who lived here from 1883 to 1928, and finally artist Tommie Wurtsbaugh Glick, who restored the house after buying it in 1970. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1973.

Denton, TX

Chartered in 1901 and awarded to Denton in 1902 after a fourteen-city contest, this was the first building to rise on the campus that opened in September 1903 as the Girls Industrial College, with 186 students and 14 faculty. The neoclassical hall served as the sole academic structure for years and housed a succession of presidents as the school grew and was renamed again and again—College of Industrial Arts, Texas State College for Women, and finally Texas Woman's University in 1957. It stands as the origin point of the only university in the United States founded expressly for the education of women.

Houston, TX

In 1924, seven friends living near the new Museum of Fine Arts founded the Garden Club of Houston to study horticulture and beautify the city. They took over the museum grounds in 1931, commissioning a designed south garden completed for a national meeting in 1939, and launched an annual bulb and plant mart that popularized new plants across the region. Their fundraising has since supported parks, nature centers, and cultural institutions throughout Houston.

Southbridge, MA

Gold Star monuments carry forward a tradition born in World War I, when families hung a service flag with a blue star for each member in uniform — a star that turned gold if that son or daughter died in the war. The image gave a name to the grieving mothers left behind, and by the late 1920s they had organized into a national movement that lobbied for remembrance and even sailed to visit their children's graves overseas. In a Worcester County mill town like Southbridge, whose factories and immigrant families sent many young men to the nation's wars, a memorial to the Gold Star Mother turned private loss into public honor.

Carson City, NV

Designed by Reno architect George A. Ferris and completed at a cost of $22,700, this neoclassical residence is the only home ever built expressly for Nevada's governor. Acting Governor Denver Dickerson and his wife Una became its first residents in July 1909, and their daughter June was born there two months later. Sixteen families occupied the mansion through the twentieth century, and in 2000 First Lady Dema Guinn led a revitalization of its grounds.

Grapevine, TX

Nineteen-year-old Benjamin R. Wall founded the Grapevine Sun in 1895, and two years later sold it to English-born James E. Keeling, beginning an 80-year family newspaper run. Keeling's son Ed edited the weekly with his wife's help from 1912, and after his death in 1953 his daughter Zena Keeling Oxford took the editor's chair while her husband set the type. The paper printed mostly encouraging local news until its 1976 sale ended three generations of family ownership.

Austin, TX

After arriving in East Austin from Mexico in 1911, the Herrera family turned their home near 3rd and Chicon into a bakery and a Spanish-language school. Daughters Consuelo Herrera Méndez and Mary Grace Herrera became among the first Tejana women to teach in a major Texas school system, working in segregated 'escuelitas' and later fighting for their students—Mary Grace testified in a 1973 federal desegregation trial, and Consuelo led LULAC's Ladies League. Across three generations, culminating in school-board member Diana Herrera Castañeda, the family made education and advocacy their life's work.

Whitemarsh Township, PA · est. 2023

In 1796, as Philadelphia endured recurring waves of deadly yellow fever, merchant and state senator Anthony Morris built this fieldstone estate outside the city as a country refuge for his family. Its late Georgian mansion—designed by the Philadelphia figure Timothy Matlack—anchored an original 200-acre property that passed through the Sheaff family for a century before Caroline Sinkler acquired it in 1917 and gave it Colonial Revival updates. The house layers more than a century of American taste, from Federal-era elegance to early-twentieth-century revivalism.

Gainesville, TX

In 1898 Frances Dougherty Houston, an heir to a Cooke County fortune, built this striking example of frontier Victorian architecture, hiring local designer J.G. Garrett, credited with many of Gainesville's finest buildings. Its solid brick walls enclose twelve rooms with nine fireplaces, finished in oak, cherry, and bird's-eye maple. The home was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

Danbury Township, OH

Built in 1822 of locally quarried limestone, this sturdy house was the home of Benajah Wolcott, first keeper of the Marblehead Lighthouse, and his second wife, Rachel Miller Wolcott. After Benajah died in 1832, Rachel carried on the demanding work of tending the light, making her one of the earliest women to hold such a post on the Great Lakes. The Keeper's House survives as one of the oldest dwellings in the area and a rare relic of Lake Erie's frontier-era settlement.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2012

On this Philadelphia ground stood the home John B. Kelly built for a family that would become American royalty of a sort. "Jack" Kelly rose from a bricklaying trade to business success and city politics, and won three Olympic gold medals in rowing in the 1920s; his son "Kell" carried the sculling tradition to Henley and the 1956 Olympics. His daughter Grace became an Academy Award-winning actress and then, as Princess of Monaco, a genuine princess — turning a striving Irish-American clan into a mid-century legend.

Houston, TX

In 1906 Margaret Hunter Kinkaid, barred from public-school teaching because she was married, began instructing seven kindergartners in her Houston dining room. Her home school grew into the Kinkaid School, the city's oldest private non-parochial school, expanding through new campuses and a high school program as its reputation spread nationally. She led it until shortly before her death in 1951.

Marshall, TX

In 1887 twenty-five Marshall women formed the Ingleside Circulating Book Club, each buying a book to trade with the others; when they and four other clubs federated in 1899, their first civic goal was a public library. It opened in 1900 with 174 books and hay bales for chairs, later moving into City Hall, where dollar-a-year reading tickets funded the shelves. For sixty-nine years the clubwomen ran library service with no public tax money, built this Georgian building in 1926, and finally handed the keys to the city in 1971.

McCamey, TX

Built in 1940–41 on land the school district provided, this was McCamey's first stone-veneer building, raised to house the town's Girl Scout troops. The whole community pitched in—oil-company trucks hauled stone from Bobcat Hill, the Scouts contributed their prized rock collections, and cedar from nearby canyons became the balcony woodwork. For years it hosted Scout cook-outs and campouts and served as McCamey's social center.

New Garden Township, PA · est. 1926

This line marks the edge of the Manor of Steyning, a 15,500-acre tract William Penn patented to his daughter Laetitia in 1701 for the token yearly rent of a single beaver skin and "fatherly love." Beside it lay a companion tract granted to his son William Penn Jr. in 1706. Such proprietary manors were how the Penn family reserved and parceled great blocks of colonial Pennsylvania among their heirs.

Jefferson, TX

Built around 1860 by Mr. and Mrs. Dan Parks when Jefferson was the greatest river port in the Southwest, this home was bought in 1861 by S. Marsh, whose name it long carried. For more than half a century it was home to Sarah Terhune Taylor, a charter member of the 1881 Club—one of Texas's oldest women's clubs.

Wheeler, TX

Built in 1914 by J.M. Porter, an ex-cowboy who ranched nearby, and his wife Millie, this Panhandle home belonged to a remarkable pioneer woman. Millie Porter had herded sheep as a child, attended Fort Worth University as a young woman and enrolled at the University of Oklahoma at the age of 70, and wrote valued histories of the region, including "Memory Cups of Panhandle Pioneers."

City of Albany, NY

This memorial speaks in the voice of a grieving but grateful community, vowing to keep fresh the memory of local men who 'made the supreme sacrifice in the world war.' Erected in the years after World War I, it belongs to a wave of American 'Mother's' and Gold Star memorials that honored both the fallen and the mothers who lost sons. Albany, like cities across the country, gathered its war dead into permanent public remembrance.

Independence, TX

This bell tells a small, human story from the days of the Republic of Texas. In 1856 Nancy Moffette Lea gave it to Independence Baptist Church in gratitude for the religious conversion of her son-in-law, Sam Houston, hero of San Jacinto and the Republic's first president. Cast of copper and tin for a soft tone by New York's Meneely Foundry, it rang over the community until a fall from the belfry cracked it in 1969.

Richmond, TX

Col. P.E. Peareson, a Civil War veteran and lawyer whose firm practiced in Richmond for nearly a century, moved this dignified house to the site in 1869, where his relatives lived until 1931. It then passed to Thomas Blakely Winston, a great-great-grandson of Jane Long, remembered as the "Mother of Texas." Fittingly, the home stands on land granted to Mrs. Long in 1827, tying the property to the earliest days of Anglo settlement in the region.

Upper Dublin Township, PA · est. 2002

Founded in 1910 by Jane Bowne Haines and a "congress of women," this school was among the first in the nation to train women for professional careers in horticulture and agriculture. It became a seedbed for organized women's work in the field, hosting the founding of the Woman's National Farm and Garden Association in 1913. During both world wars its students taught women to grow and preserve food for the war effort before the school merged with Temple University in 1958.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2022

Shut out of the all-male art clubs of the late nineteenth century, a group of professional women artists founded the Plastic Club in Philadelphia in 1897 and began mounting their own exhibitions here in 1909. Its members included some of the era's most accomplished illustrators and painters, among them Emily Sartain, Violet Oakley, Jessie Willcox Smith, and Elizabeth Shippen Green. The club gave women a professional home and a public stage in a field that had long excluded them.

Salado, TX

Alabama-born James Ferguson became a Methodist circuit rider, carrying the gospel across central and southeast Texas for two decades after arriving in 1847. He and his wife Fannie Fitzpatrick settled in Salado to farm and run a mill; when James returned to preaching, Fannie ran the farm herself, and kept it going after his death in 1876. Their son, James Edward Ferguson, went on to be elected governor of Texas in 1914 and 1916.

Albany, TX

Scottish immigrant John Brown became minister of Albany Presbyterian Church in 1884, just as a prolonged drought threatened West Texas farmers and ranchers. Chosen to seek relief, he traveled east in 1886 to appeal to banks and churches for seed wheat, drawing both donations and the anger of Texas boosters who feared the publicity; he also petitioned the state legislature and won a relief law from Gov. Sul Ross. When Brown appealed to Clara Barton, the American Red Cross sent aid, and in January 1887 Barton herself toured the stricken counties and left a personal donation to spur further giving.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1998

In 1879 seventeen-year-old Eliza Shirley, newly arrived from England, opened the first U.S. corps of the Salvation Army on Oxford Street, carrying out a mission from the movement's founder, William Booth. What began with a teenager's storefront ministry to the poor grew into one of the largest charitable organizations in the country. From this Philadelphia beginning, the Army spread its blend of evangelism and social relief nationwide.

Clifton Heights, PA · est. 2019

A coiled steel spring that could "walk" down stairs became one of the twentieth century's most beloved toys — and it was made right here. Richard James stumbled onto the idea in 1943, his wife Betty gave it the name Slinky, and James Industries manufactured it in Clifton Heights for decades. When Richard walked away in 1960 and left a nearly bankrupt firm to Betty, she rebuilt it into a multimillion-dollar enterprise, later earning a place in the Toy Industry Hall of Fame.

Austin, TX

The Texas Federation of Women's Clubs, founded in 1897 to advance education and humanitarian causes, achieved its dream of a permanent state headquarters with this building in the early 1930s. Designed by prominent Dallas architect Henry Coke Knight, it is among the finest examples of Georgian Revival architecture in Texas, crowned by a dominant two-story central portico. The building anchored decades of statewide women's civic organizing.

Hereford, TX

Built in 1906 on the developing plains of the Texas Panhandle, this Hereford home passed in 1908 to the Thompson family, where "Aunt Jennie" and "Aunt Jessie" nursed the sick and helped deliver babies until a hospital opened in 1924. The house doubled as a boarding place for judges, court reporters, students, and traveling preachers and singers. Its rooms held together much of the young town's social, medical, and religious life.

Washington Township, NJ

In 1886 a young working woman named Tillie Smith was found murdered near the Centenary Collegiate Institute in Hackettstown, New Jersey, and her death became one of the most talked-about cases in the Gilded Age Northeast. The public, moved by the belief that she had resisted an attacker at the cost of her life, raised money by subscription to erect this monument in her memory. Its stark inscription — declaring that she died defending her honor — turned an ordinary domestic worker into a lasting symbol of female virtue as her era understood it.

Columbia, SC

This plaque marks "The Torch Bearer," a bronze sculpture given to the University of South Carolina in 1965 by Anna Hyatt Huntington, one of the most celebrated American sculptors of her generation. Working well into her eighties, Huntington was renowned for her powerful equestrian and allegorical figures, and she and her husband placed her monumental works at campuses and public grounds across the country. A torch-bearing figure like this one was a classic emblem of learning and enlightenment passed from one hand to the next, a fitting gift to a university.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2025

In 1868 a young immigrant domestic worker named Hester Vaughn was convicted of infanticide by an all-male jury in Philadelphia and sentenced to hang. Reformers of the Working Women's Association and the suffrage movement seized on the case, arguing that a woman tried without any women on her jury had been denied a jury of her peers. Their campaign persuaded Governor John Geary to pardon her and turned a single verdict into a national argument about justice and women's rights.

Austin, TX

For half a century Texas women organized, petitioned, and lobbied for the ballot, from the first suffrage bill filed in 1868 to a cascade of associations that culminated in the Texas Equal Suffrage Association. Their breakthrough came in March 1918, when the legislature granted women the vote in primary elections and more than 386,000 rushed to register in just seventeen days. On June 28, 1919, Texas became the first Southern state and the ninth in the nation to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment.

Bryan, TX

Twenty women founded this club in 1895 as the Mutual Improvement Circle, meeting to study, serve their community, and advance the cause of women's rights — their first year devoted to the history of Greece. They went on to shape their town, establishing Bryan's Carnegie Library in 1903, beautifying downtown, and planting the live oaks that still line the approach to Texas A&M. Renamed The Woman's Club in 1909, it remains active more than a century later.

Beaumont, TX

On January 18, 1895, Mrs. Hal W. Greer and a handful of friends gathered at her Beaumont home and founded what became the Beaumont Literary Club. It affiliated with the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs, won a state charter in 1905, and built a clubhouse in 1909 that drew in the Shakespeare and Matinee Music clubs as departments. Renamed the Woman's Club of Beaumont in 1927, it grew from a cultural circle into a force for community development.

El Paso, TX

Organized in 1895 as the Child Culture Study Circle and soon renamed the Current Topics Club, this women's group aimed to improve the physical, intellectual, and moral life of El Paso; three years later it became the Woman's Club of El Paso. In 1916 the members built their own clubhouse, designed by O.H. Thorman and built by H.T. Ponsford and Sons in a blend of Georgian and Beaux-Arts styling. The building became a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1980.

Georgetown, TX

In 1893, Lula Holland Leavell and her daughters hosted a literary reading that grew into a women's club, formally organized as the Initial History Club in 1897 to pursue literature, history, music, and civic affairs. In 1917 it merged with two other local groups to become the Woman's Club of Georgetown. More than a century on, it continues its work of civic enrichment and support for the arts.

Orange, TX

With few cultural outlets for women in 1890s Orange, a small group met in 1893 to form the Ladies' Shakespeare Club for the study of literature and history. Renamed and joined to the General Federation of Women's Clubs in 1903, the club organized Orange's first library—starting from a courthouse magazine exchange—and in 1923 built a clubhouse that housed the town's first public library. As the Woman's Club, the group carried its founders' civic traditions into the 21st century.

San Antonio, TX

In 1898 philanthropist Eleanor Brackenridge and journalist Marin B. Fenwick gathered eighteen women to form the Woman's Club of San Antonio—the first departmental club in Texas. Brackenridge led it for seven years as it pressed for women's suffrage and education, social reform, and the arts. In 1926 the club made its home in a handsome 1907–08 residence built for civic leader David J. Woodward.

Seguin, TX

Built in 1902-1903 by the Women's Federated Clubs of Seguin, this Greek revival building is remembered as the first structure in Texas erected solely for women's clubs. To raise its $500 cost, the women — led by Mrs. Joseph B. Dibrell — staged bazaars, theatricals, and ice cream suppers. Moved to its present site on land donated by Mrs. Edgar Nolte in 1937 and expanded in 1949, it stands as a monument to organized women's civic life.

George West, TX

Born in 1898 to a fourth-generation Texas ranching family, Thelma Pugh-Lindholm grew up on the original Pugh homestead across the Nueces from George West and turned a childhood love of local history into a lifelong vocation. She earned advanced degrees, taught in ranch schools and George West ISD for 47 years, and tutored many neighbors toward diplomas and U.S. citizenship. She also wrote more than twenty of Live Oak County's official historical marker narratives and chaired its historical commission, earning the title "the mother of Live Oak County history."

Victoria, TX

Irish-born John Joseph Linn came to Texas as a merchant and became the last alcalde and first mayor of Victoria, serving in the Provisional Government of 1835 and the first Congress of the Republic. His home was a waypoint of the Texas Revolution: volunteers of the New Orleans Greys and the Alabama Red Rovers were welcomed there on their way to join Fannin's doomed command at Goliad, and Victoria's women molded bullets for the army nearby. Linn died on the site in 1885.

Austin, TX

Painting contractor John W. Thompson and his wife Jennie built this Victorian home in the fashionable Robertson Hill neighborhood after their 1877 marriage, and their daughter Willie Mae lived in it until her death in 1966. The house then took on a new life: the Alpha Kappa Zeta Chapter of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, a graduate chapter founded in 1940, acquired and restored it in 1967 as a meeting place. It became Austin's first Black Greek-letter house.

Granbury vicinity, TX

This roadside marker points travelers three miles south to the grave of Elizabeth Crockett, widow of the frontiersman and Alamo martyr David Crockett. Left behind in Tennessee when David went to Texas, Elizabeth later claimed the land granted for his sacrifice and lived out her years in Texas, dying in 1860 at seventy-four. The marker keeps her memory, and her famous husband's, on the map of the Texas landscape.

Washington, DC

When the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg and sank on April 15, 1912, more than 1,500 people died in the frigid North Atlantic, many of them men who stepped back so women and children could reach the lifeboats. In the years after the disaster, women across the United States raised funds dime by dime to honor that sacrifice. The resulting granite memorial, designed by sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, depicts a robed figure with outstretched arms and now stands along Washington's Southwest waterfront.

Midlothian, TX

Jake Sewell bought these Midlothian lots in 1912, and after marrying Nettie Witherspoon in 1915 the couple built this house—likely funded by dividends from the Hog Creek Oil Company—sometime after 1918. In the 1930s Nettie rented rooms to the town's single women teachers. For more than half a century the home belonged to Clyde and Cloma Trotter; Cloma, a civic leader who became Midlothian's first female mayor, left it to the Salvation Army. Its Arts and Crafts and Prairie School design features a wide porch, porte-cochere, oak floors, Rookwood tiles, and a curved staircase.

Weatherford, TX

On February 8, 1900, twenty-nine Weatherford women founded the Twentieth Century Club, joining the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs later that year. After meeting in members' homes, they built a clubhouse—delayed by World War I—and expanded it with a library and stage by 1941. During World War II the club ran a USO for troops from nearby Fort Wolters, and it has long provided scholarships, school supplies, and civic gatherings for Parker County.

Borger, TX

When Borger erupted as a rowdy oil-boom town in 1926, society editor Sadie McBride gathered a circle of women who craved something more cultured than the boomtown offered. In 1927 they organized the Twentieth Century Club around a monthly book plan, and by 1928 they had opened a subscription library on Borger's main street. Their fundraising and advocacy led to a WPA-built adobe branch library in 1938 and helped shape Hutchinson County's library system for decades.

Tyler, TX

Five women's clubs of Tyler, banded together as the Federated Women's Clubs, spent years building toward a public library for their growing East Texas town. In 1902 they secured a $15,000 gift from philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, and the community raised the funds for books, furnishings, and grounds. The Italian Renaissance–style building that opened held reading rooms below and Tyler's only public auditorium above, later doubled in size and adorned with murals of East Texas life.

Brazoria County, TX

This Greek Revival frame house on the Brazoria County coast traces the long life of Ariadne Gautier, who came from Florida in 1841 and buried three husbands—one of them a Terry's Texas Ranger who died at Shiloh in 1862—before building the original house around 1872. It later passed to Frank Chilton, a captain in Hood's Texas Brigade, and then to Austin Bryan, grandnephew of Stephen F. Austin, whose family added a vernacular two-story wing. The Weems family held the home from 1919 until 2000.

Kingsville, TX

With war looming, the Naval Expansion Act of 1940 fueled a two-ocean navy, and Kingsville leaders won a station by touting their open skies, flat terrain, and year-round flying weather. Commissioned on July 4, 1942, the Naval Auxiliary Air Station trained cadets in carrier landings, practicing touch-and-go on strips built to mimic flight-deck length and running bombing runs over Padre Island, while a unit of Navy WAVES served in support roles. The base helped prepare aviators for both the Pacific and Atlantic before it was decommissioned in 1951 and later reborn as a full Naval Air Station in 1968.

Van Alstyne, TX

Pioneer landowner, banker, and community leader James C. Umphress, a Confederate veteran, built this Victorian house in 1903 for his wife, Julia Caroline. In 1932 it passed to their daughter, Maude Umphress Taylor, a civic leader married to a local banker, who lived here into the 1970s. Its Queen Anne and classical-revival details mark it as a showpiece of small-town Texas prosperity.

Denton, TX

In the 1930s the Exterior Beautification Committee of Texas State College for Women—now Texas Woman's University—created a rock garden and native botanical area, planning and landscaping it with plants from Texas and beyond and building paths and walls of native stone. A chapel in the woods was added in 1938, and the gardens became a beloved campus focal point before falling into neglect after World War II. Restored in the late 1970s through a partnership of university officials and residents, the site now protects native Texas wildflowers and serves as an outdoor classroom.

Gilmer, TX

During the Civil War, Upshur County became a busy Confederate supply and training center, its factories in Gilmer and Ore City turning out hats, shoes, saddles, cloth, iron, and pottery for the army while a quartermaster depot coordinated the effort. With the men away at the front, women, children, and the elderly kept the farms producing grain, meat, and cotton. The marker also honors Emma Sansom, the teenaged "sunbonnet heroine" who guided Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry to a hidden ford in Alabama and later settled in Texas.