History At Night – By Her Labors and Toils with Chris Avery

well thank you all for coming out uh it is a tremendous honor to be able to speak at a site like this so thank you all for coming here thank you for Allison for thinking of me uh the topic of tonight's conversation is something that came up several times with my wife he used to work at the Fort Ben Museum and it was really talking about how a lot of the land passed through the maternal lines and how that came about and some of that we cover in law school some of it's just me being a geek but it really is an interesting topic and how much the frontier and the realities of Texas put Texas at the Forefront of a lot of laws that were more favorable to women so it's kind of cool tonight starting off women's History Month that we're going to be able to talk about a lot of this but being a lawyer before I begin I've got to throw out a few caveats so the first caveat is who we're talking about because when we talk about the laws the laws of the time weren't equal so the laws that we're going to discuss only applied to Anglo women and tahano women they wouldn't applied to the enslaved nor they've applied to the Native Americans that had to wait for a long time bigger presentations on that should be done at a later date the time frame that we're looking at is roughly from about the time of Mexican Independence in 1821 about to the Civil War that time period is when when Texas really forms what would become the foundation of our laws it's also a period when it's unsettled things are a little bit Wild and the frontier conditions are in place which allow the laws then to adapt to those circumstances lastly we're not going to be going all that deep we've got a lot of ground to cover and so I'm not going to be going through a ton of case law through statutes and all of that we're going to hit the high points and my approach to this really is not as a lawyer who practices in this area looking backwards I'm more of an amateur historian who happens to speak legal so there's going to be a lot of history explaining the law as it existed so one thing to understand and that I think we always miss as Texans is how vast the state of Texas really is we joke about it we talk about the mileage when you hit the signed I 10 in bont but until you put it on a map you don't realize we're the size of France when the early colonists came in in the 1700s and then even up to the old 300 even up until statehood this whole area had a smaller population than Cino Ranch just down the road in Katie and so when you think about that and you spread that group of people out across that area it was very very distant which plays into all of how this works out so the concept in addressing all this really begins in 1821 Mexico WIS this independence from Spain realizes there's a ton of territory now they know that Texas has vast natural resources they know they can work it for a profit and coincidentally it'll also help serve as a barrier from Native American attacks down into the interior of Mexico so what do we do about it well they turn to a system that worked somewhat for Spain before earlier in the late 1700s the Spanish had recruited American settlers to move into Missouri Arkansas and Louisiana so if you know Daniel Boone Daniel Boone did not die in Kentucky because he took his family and all their friends and moved to Missouri and they settled that land and so the Spanish had set an example that this might work and so they think they're getting families like this classic Scots Irish settlers always pushing West maybe they adopted Catholicism maybe not the problem is they didn't get this family they got this guy so if you've ever read any of Steven Harden's books this guy shows up quite frequently the reality of the situation is that once they open it up for immigration overwhelming numbers of single men show up it's not what they anticipated they thought it would be more families Stephen F Austin obviously had the 300 and they were spread out but if you look at the actual numbers it's overwhelmingly male and yeah they took the promise to accept Catholicism to convert that's great except you got to have a priest to actually convert them there weren't many of those on the frontier same thing to the extent there was law there's not exactly a lot of law enforcement when your neighbor's 25 miles not even down the road because there weren't roads so this is a different environment it's a tough environment and it's overwhelmingly male so at this point you're probably asking yourself I thought he was going to talk about women how on Earth is this going to work out women had a different reality those that came found a different situation that was every bit as hard if not harder on them than it was for the men but the hardness actually worked out in a certain way that shifted the balance of power and we'll see that in the law the distance between the homes required a partnership between the man and a woman that you typically didn't see in the more settled areas of the East Coast you're out there by yourself frequently the man would have to go attend to whatever business or hunt the wife is left there alone so there is a partnership there at a different level that you don't see in the East Coast or even in Europe the other thing that's often ignored is the marital options if it's an 8020 ratio of men to women the women got a lot of options to choose from and so you'll see that as we talk about marriage and divorce laws and how laxed they are the ability to move if somebody is not great there's an option there lastly the fact is perceptions matter in the shape of the law the people that lived here understood the realities they understood how tough it was and so if you could stand that and you could be productive it didn't matter if you were a man or a woman you were counted as part of the community and so what you see among the original settlers even though they weren't close to each other is a camaraderie that later came out in jury verdicts that we'll talk about as new settlers came in later on some of that changes as it becomes more populous yes things change as they do as you get more uh I'd say Urban but it's not exactly Urban by our standards so all of these factors are going to play into how the law adapts and then how it shifts some of the balances that brings us up to about 1836 in the Republic so we all know April 21st 1836 we win the Battle of San jna we have the Republic and this is where most history books stop we stop here we pick up a statehood and off we go what we ignore though is the fact that you've got got to create a whole new country you have to have courts but what's different in the Texas Revolution is that you've got a differences in the laws when we split from England and the United States had that war all the colonies had been on the same system of English law you had existing judges you had the similar thing across the board everybody knew what it was that eventually became American law the difference in Texas is before the the uh Republic Spanish law applied many of those settlers had lived 10 15 20 years and had adopted that law and balanced it against their knowledge of the American law what's better what's not do we peacemeal it do we do it whole how are we going to apply these laws what's a court going to look like during the Spanish period you didn't have a court as we understand it the local alal frequently was the only judge you have local councils but the Spanish version of a court is very different than the English version that was being used in the United States and lastly of course you've got a vast area how are you going to enforce it most of law enforcement is the Rangers and there're somewhere up in north Texas dealing with that situation so how does all this affect women in a legal way and really in two big ways which is what we're going to focus on tonight first one is marital property it's the idea of is it yours is it mine whose property is it land cattle whatever that's the question second is in marriage and divorce how can you get married how can you get divorc how do those laws stay the same how do they differ from what we've got now and we're going to see some surprisingly Advanced uh positions on that so first one marital property when the Republic happens Texas has to decide between two systems you got the English common law system that was used in England and then the rest of the United States in the Spanish law community property system there're two very very different systems of Law and different systems of property so under English common law and the idea behind common law by the way is not that there's a statute it's that similar facts should result in similar Holdings and so the idea of common law is that as you try a case if you can establish similar facts you should get a similar result so whenever you hear about common law on TV or things like that that's what they mean and so that's why you look at series of cases you try to analogize to those so that's what common law means but under this system when the husband and wife married they would become one unit sounds right I mean Woman become one right uh except for the fact that the wife is subsumed inside the man under this system the husband and wife merge but the husband controls the entire State the husband can manage or even sell the wife's property even if it was a debt he had before he got married and if they split the wife only gets alimony he gets to keep the land and everything else along with it so an example let's say you got a couple in Tennessee Maryland wherever they get married father said father-in-law says okay here's plot of land good luck have a good time husband now owns the land he can use the land to pay his debts from before marriage he can increw any debts during the marriage that he wants he can use it however he wants to his only obligation is to be a good husband that's it if he dies the wife doesn't get the property under that law the property would have gone to the other heirs typically the oldest son she's left with a one-third life estate and what that means if there's any genealogy nerds you've seen the wills that to my wife onethird of the property where she now lives during the rest of her natural life the idea was she would be able to have onethird of the income from that property until she passed away the expectation is the children of the sons will take over that's the idea in the event of a divorce husband keeps the land he can ask the wife to leave all he has to do is pay alimony so that's the English system the Spanish community property system on the other hand is very very different and so this is what I like to call the three buckets husband has a bucket the wife has a bucket together they've got a community bucket so this is very very different you don't merge into one everybody keeps their own property under this system whatever you bring into the marriage or whatever comes to you by inheritance or by a gift remains your separate property so you do that what you build together after the marriage income property whatever you have is shared jointly so let's say you had a farm the farm produces crops and you have $1,000 you split it 50/50 now under this system it's not completely 50/50 because the husband has managerial control over the wife's property but he cannot sell the wife's separate property without her permission and if he messes it up she actually has a claim against him for fraud on the community estate so she can hold him to that promise so let's take our same couple now they move to Texas receive a l Grant under under this system now the husband and wife own the land equally all the crops and income are split 50/50 if the husband goes off and makes a bad deal the wife has a claim against him the cool thing is if the husband dies the wife is perfectly free to remarry but she keeps the land as her own so when the new husband shows up she's got not only the married the property she brought into her first marriage but all the property she amassed by that uh by the second marriage which gives you leverage in the marital relationship because the wives frequently had more property than the husbands there's a divorce wife takes her half and keeps her separate property now the husband has no obligation to pay alimony but the idea there is if the wife has half the property then that should be sufficient to make it work and it's also a real kind of a quirk if you get into Old Texas law you don't say the word alimony spous will is okay alimony is not because well let's face with a lot of our Founders had divorce problems back in the States one question that always comes up when I'm discussing this is why why are these systems so different between English common law and the Spanish law and it's really fascinating how far back the answer goes so starting with the English common law two gentleman on the right Richard III and Oliver Cromwell when you go through English history from about the 13 1800s on up until the 1700s England is pretty much at war with itself throughout that period you have the wars of the Roses you have the religious wars you have everything else in there everybody's vying for power so those in power want to keep it so they create a system that's going to keep the power going to the greatest winner it creates the aristocracy and that's how it evolves but also because of that English law stays a little undeveloped until the 1700s in fact we don't even have the idea of hearsay really until 1720s or so something we take for granted is that old the Spanish on the other hand had a very different experience and that's why we have Queen Isabella here so when we think of Spain we think of the entire Iberian Peninsula that wasn't always the case up till the 1400s the Moors from North Africa controlled most of the Iberian Peninsula except for two kingdoms Aragon and Castile they always wanted to retake that land which they felt was theirs and so King Ferdinand of Aragon struck a deal with Queen Isabelle of Castile let's work together let's get married and try to take back all of Spain Isabelle is smart and she negotiates what today we'd call a prenup and she creates a deal if we win or if we lose I keep my kingdom you keep your kingdom those are ours it's our separate deal if we win we're splitting that territory 50/50 it's the very foundation of the laws that we have now now we know the Spanish ultimately did take over once they're gone it becomes a frontier Society husband and wife having to live together in this new territory with threats of violence all the time so you see in the systems there that the roots of what we have now go all the way back to the 1490s so back to the choice what is Texas going to do we've got a major influx of new people from the East a lot of them lawyers they know the law they know the advantages but you've got a large number of settlers who'd been here before they experienced it they had children they had wives they had deaths they had the whole thing they debated 1836 with the original Constitution debated again in 1840 when things settled down and again in 1845 with statehood commun property wins hands down every time which is really remarkable in the cases and in the realities you see the opinions the judges and a lot of the people recognize Frontier realities it doesn't make sense to have a common law system where everything's vested in the man when the women are equally a part of this with it is the idea of being a Texan that we talked about the perceptions if you earned it by golly you get it that was the attitude and so the protection is there now let's be honest though it's not all altruistic there's also a benefit to the husbands if the husband brought debts from the United States they can't burden the community estate so if the husband comes down and marries a wealthy Widow who has a ton of land oh well so much for those debts you can't take them so if you're a debtor which so many people were it worked out better so all around that's the choice the cool thing is this is from the constitution of 1845 so we had to create a new Constitution and when Texas was admitted to the union this is the first time in United States history that a government has set out a document protecting the rights of women to their property so section 19 all the personal property of the wife shall be her separate property section 22 same thing with the consent that if there is a community estate the husband cannot sell it without the permission of the wife if he does it she's got a cause of action against him this is the very first document in American history where a government has done it and we often ignore that we forget about it but in 1845 Texas becomes the first government to recognize that another cool statement that I found comes from a supreme court opinion 1851 by Chief Justice John Hill we'll talk about him in a minute and it's really fascinating to think about how forward thinking this is in the 1850s the husband and the wife are not one under our laws they are co-equals in life and you think about that that in the rest of the United States that wasn't the case but in 1851 Texas is already saying no that's how we're going to do it so under this system then the marital property laws work out more in favor of the wife than they naturally would have in the United States so just curiosity it's always fun to see which states use this system or not this is the current list of which states follow community property versus common law so you can see a trend among Texas in the Spanish-speaking States or at least those were controlled by Spain they adopted community property now the fun fact if you look into it is why Wisconsin so everybody else is why are they doing that well the answer is interesting so Wisconsin came into the Union not after Texas they have their Constitutional Convention they've got a frontier reality and so they're looking for the latest and greatest improvements to the US Constitution what can we do they found the Texas Constitution and said hey that sounds like a great idea so Wisconsin is the community property State uh now reality though is flashing forward almost all states have adopted some statutory version of community property law but a lot of it came about about starting in the 1900s then eventually the 1960s so when you look at it Texas in the 1840s is already enacting What it Took until the 1960s for the rest of the country to figure out so next marriage and divorce we talk about community property all we want to but you got to get married and you may split up so that's we got to go through those marriage in a place where you're spread out across miles is not what we think of today you didn't really have established churches particularly if you were supposed to have adopted Catholicism and there's not exactly cour houses where you can go down and have a civil ceremony so what was eventually the system people use was something called Bond marriages now it was sometimes used on the American frontier if you see some things in genealogy especially in the South about reading the bands things like that some of the more Presbyterian communities would have that the idea is that the couple would give bonds to each other that we're going to stay together and if we don't I'll pay you know name the amount $100 $250 whatever and as soon as a minister comes by then we'll go ahead and formally TI it on and that worked and for a frontier Community like this that system worked well but what it means is as you have deaths and divorces and everything else you can potentially have a lot of issues where do that couple actually married if they're not married what's the status of their kids are they illegitimate do they have any rights what are they and Texas said you know what that's the reality so they adopted it so in 1841 the legislature looks at it and formalizes all the old marriages if you had a bond marriage if you had something similar to common law all that was recognized meaning that all the kids would be legitimate and they had full rights of theirs under the property laws then once again in 1847 Texas gets out in the lead of the rest of the country they recognized the idea that people could commit to each other live together forever everybody recognizes them as husband and wife they just didn't have a formal stamp of approval and so we adopt essentially what becomes common law marriage it's the first time it's set out that you can do that there's certain requirements have to be actual agreements between the two parties to be married that one's very important living together for so many years holding yourself out to others and a couple other legal requirements about how long you had to be together but once again in 1847 we're already adapting the laws to meet the realities which is that couples are moving into the frontier there's no way to get married so we're not going to force them to it we're not going to jeopardize them because they couldn't so the law adapts to that unique situation divorce is equally as uh different now at the time especially during the colony period divorce was prohibited by Mexican law which was an extension of the Catholic prohibitions so technically you couldn't really get divorced without going through the Catholic procedures America was very similar to get a divorce in Most states in America you actually had to go and have an act of the legislature to be divorced So eventually when William Barrett Travis divorced his wife after moving to Texas it actually had to go through the Alabama the legislature which to even get the bill to the legislature in various States you had to know somebody you had to know a congressman legislators didn't meet all the time so this was a difficult procedure but in Texas we recognized that just doesn't work on the frontier sometimes things don't work out given the realities of it so in 1837 the legislature actually allows divorce it doesn't specify the grounds but they actually authorize it which is something for the first time that's done in the US now the important development though in 1841 so again why 1841 well it's cu the first three or four years we had a whole problem with Mexico and laws weren't stable so we had to revisit that in 1840 see if you keep seeing 1840 in this presentation that's why but this one's really important in a couple of ways so the legislature authorized divorces and they specify the grounds cruelty abandonment and adultery those were fairly common mentioned in other cases but for the first time it's formalized now the important thing though is the legislature recognizing how we're going to enforce this the legislature can't take all that time dealing with the situation so for the first time they authorize courts to Grant divorces that's something new for the entire United States the courts because by then have them somewhat established are closer to the people it's much easier it's much more flexible now the interesting thing though about the divorces is that frequently juries get to decide the questions so this is why the frontier perceptions matter because the juries are made up entirely of men and they're looking at the situation of a divorce if the husband has not lived up to his obligations as a frontier man but the wife has guess who they're siding with so it's a very interesting concept that we're this far ahead of the rest of the country in putting that perception and putting that power into the courts that are right there instead of forcing everybody to go through the legislature in Austin or Houston whichever it might have been at the time another interesting part about this is how the legislature Define cruelty and you're talking about a violent cruel Society so first one rudess and incivility they happen every day unfound charges of unchastity this one came about because in a frontier Society where the husband's gone a lot if the husband wants to get out of things you can blame the wife for that visitor that came by so that's why that one's in there but they can't be unfounded the third one is really interesting to me physical assault of children from a previous marriage that in the 1840s they already recognized that The Stepfather or the stepmother may not be that kind and so they're going to step up and protect the kids which is really interesting for the 1840s next one habitual drunkenness that prohibited attending to marital obligations which you've got to wonder how drunk you had to be in that day and age and the answer is it has to be more than three months there's actually a Supreme Court case Again by Justice Hill where a gentleman spent three to four months basically on a bender in Galveston the report said he was being rude to his wife he wasn't doing anything but the record wasn't clear and so Justice Hill said three months maybe not enough I need some more information on it but if it was three years three years of drunkenness that would probably do it so there's your answer for how drunk you had to be lastly battery or verbal abuse threatening violence again violent Society there's a famous case where the husband tried to divorce his wife because she attacked him with an ax that worked so interesting uh statistics here because everybody always wonders okay well you could get a divorce but did anybody actually do it and the answer is yeah so from the time around about 1840 or so up until about the 1850s of the Supreme Court divorce appeals over half of them were initiated by women so they were definitely using this in 1845 the 11th District Court in Harris County all but one were women so another cool thing the 11th District Court still exists in Harris County if you remember all the IE litigation they were in that court so it's still there today so the records are still around that in 1860 at this point we're fairly populous as a state we're right on the eve of the Civil War women filed for divorce twice as much as men did and so what you see working through is the ceptions mattered the women have a lot of available spouses they can change if the husband doesn't work out they can move and trade and make a better life and so we'll go through some of those in a minute but it's a very interesting very modern look at how things worked back then so we're going to tie it all together with one case marital property and community property Cas is called Carol versus Carol 1858 out of the Texas Supreme Court the situation is that two people Susan and Nathaniel come to Texas in the 1820s both of them leave their spouses both of them have kids by the first marriage they take up neither of them had divorced so Susan's kids stay with them Susan and Nathaniel stay together from 1837 to 1853 and built a fairly substantial estate during the time though that theel didn't have any contact with his first family who were somewhere deeper in East Texas so Nathaniel passes away substantial estate leaves everything to Susan so under law she would have already been entitled to her community property and her separate property but now he's giving her everything else so all of a sudden out of the woodwork comes the first son by the first marriage and says oh no no no no no no you were married to my mom that's illegitimate dad that doesn't work he must have been insane I'm challenging the will that sets up a big challenge trial court looks at it and said he's got a point so the the husband's separate property may not be hers but she appeals which brings us to Chief Justice Hill chief justice Hill at the time is very well worth mentioning because of all the opinions he had and he's also just a fascinating character in his own right so if you've heard Justice wise or some of the others that have spoken here talk about Justice Hill he's a fascinating character so he's born in South Carolina studies law in Pennsylvania eventually comes to Texas in 1838 once he gets here though he realizes this is a different place entirely so he studies the Mexican law becomes an expert on Mexican and Spanish law he's a very good American lawyer but now he adds that to the repertoire he also becomes fluent in Spanish which also helps him translate those laws studies every aspect of it he travels across the state if you've heard of the council house fight that was his courthouse at the council House Fight he was involved in that but very forward thinking and so some of his opinions the one we saw earlier about the women and men are equal that's him the other thing a lot of people don't talk about because they focus on his Juris prudence he actually had an interracial marriage in the 1850s it didn't you know was clearly not popular but he had it and so a lot of his opinions that you see are very forward thinking they're very well thought out drawing from fairness principles either under Spanish law or American law whichever fits and let's be honest he's trying to hack the law out of the Wilderness and dealing with two factions the new group from the United States the original settlers it's not an easy job job to do so now Susan Nathaniel's case winds up in front of him on the Supreme Court so question is does he go with the trial court or does he favor Susan the winner Susan he writes an opinion and goes through the whole history of the relationship why the trial Court's wrong but the best part of the opinion to me is this discussion where he talks about the fairness by her labors and toils she committed to the accumulation of the estate at the time of the marriage they had nothing they built it together their gains were the result of the joint industry Thrift and economy and she's reasonably entitled to a share of the proceeds that's really cool to think of that in 1858 the Texas Supreme Court is recognizing that that they're not going to stand on formalities they're not going to stick with an English common law system that didn't work then instead he recognizes the frontier realities that he had seen and experienced and realized that they had committed and worked it together she was a partner in that so she deserves the rest of it so it's very fascinating to me that 1858 we're already here now next I want to shift over and talk about some real stories we've talked about the law and the abstracts let's talk about some real people first one this goes back to the 1700 unds a lady named Rosa deali also known as La Patrona down in the valley so this is under Spain and under Spanish law she inherited land from her father and then eventually from her husband when he passed away altto together in 1798 she has 642 th000 acres of land which is basically most of the valley considered one of the first cattle women because they were really doing the modern version of ranching down in the valley at the time highly highly respected and still a legend in the valley to this day in her own right going forward a little bit some of y'all may have heard about Emily Austin Perry Stephen F Austin's sister eventually moved down from Missouri with her husband except when Steph Austin dies he has no kids he leaves his entire estate to his sister so under the community property law that doesn't go to her husband that's hers that made Emily because of her brother the largest landholder in the state of Texas and there's nothing anybody could say otherwise so her husband passes away a little bit earlier than he'd probably expect leaving her by herself so she becomes an autonomous businesswoman between her land grant and all of Austin's land grants and everything else she manages this estate for decades and becomes an autonomous businesswoman and leaves quite a few very interesting books uh or journals next Jane long I think a lot of people have heard of Jane lived primarily down in Richmond story is that her husband came down in the 1820s tried to filibuster in Mexico that didn't work out so well because he didn't come back left her by herself she had a baby by herself down on Gallison Bay made it through all of that and she never remarried but she got her land grants developed her own business and never remarried but throughout this whole period even though she was supposedly romantically linked to everybody from marabel Lamar to Sam Houston she never remarried but she was highly highly respected by the community and built her own business and kept things going this is interesting in Houston so two ladies Pamela Man and Susanna Dickinson and if you heard Justice wise he mentioned Pamela Man and if you Google her there are legends Galore about her now her Origins are not exactly clear but a lot of historians think she is probably alaron Dickinson's sister alaron was one of the Alamo Defenders which explains why Pamela and Susanna are tied together quite a bit when you look at the legal records so Pamela had come down she goes through three or four divorces but she builds up her own business and her own hotel which is at this spot now in downtown Houston so if you're down on Market Square in downtown Houston this is a Barnaby now the lock bar is right over here the cool thing with Pamela is despite all of the divorces she has several court cases every time the jury finds her either innocent or they find in her favor and in fact even one time she got U charged with forgery convicted which at that time forger was a capital crime the jury wrote to the governor saying yeah we found her guilty but we think she should get off so I love that jury because they actually followed instructions first at then tried to find the clemency so she was let off and in fact then later when her son got married one of the guests of honor was presidency in Houston Susanna Dickinson at the same time not as let's be honest she had a very tough life after the Alamo husband died but she got to keep the property now I don't know what happened to it I'm trying to look into that because that l Grant would have been hers but eventually she moves in with Pamela so she lives down here for a while there's some debate about what exactly her role was there but in any event she has the same experience after the Alamo she has to find somebody to help marries a guy who beat her beat her daughter she divorced him not a problem she was able to get out of that circumstance keep her property and move on eventually married her final husband over in Austin that house is still there and so even though her life was difficult she was able to make those moves that the marriage laws in the community property allowed her to do and ultimately even though it was rough she did have a pretty good end her life if we keep going forward in the 1850s you see the same Trend Anna Martin immigrates from Germany with her husband in 1850s he dies fairly quickly in 1870 once again all the properties is hers and they had quite a bit of land in West Texas now she's smart and early on she saw barbed wire for the benefits that it had had and so she starts buying it up and becomes the largest dealer of barbwire in West Texas during the cattle boom so she amasses a fortune then she turns around and uses all that money and all that cash to help found and become the CEO of a bank now some people debate it but she very well may have been the first female founder and CEO of a bank in American history and I love this quote from her that I heard men say oh she's only a woman but I showed them what a woman could do so it's pretty cool that you see this coming forward even now using the same laws last but certainly not least this one's kind of cool for me because this is where I work downtown Melly esperson so Melly and her husband Neils Neils was an immigrant from Norway they married eventually moved to Texas late 1800s early 1900s Neil's a hard worker he's also smart and he figures out that oil stuff they just discovered that looks pretty good so they make a fortune they become some of the first people to get in on the very first oil boom but during this they don't have kids so Melly and Neils work together in everything Melly becomes very involved in downtown Houston helps found two theaters the Palace Theater downtown at one time was hers Neils passes away too young and so Melly wants to create something to honor him and decides to design and create the Neil zerson building right here 27 Sor tall is the first skyscraper in downtown Houston and the second in the state of Texas all designed with him in mind and so if you go on the lobby there's a statue of them all dedicated to her husband the cool thing is she couldn't bear to be separated from him so she decided she' buil her own building with her name on it the Melly esperson building but when she's building it she didn't want to take away from her husband at all she just wanted to stand by his right where she'd always been throughout his life and she was able to do it and run her businesses up until the very end of her life her Fortune eventually became a trust trust still controls part of the building but overall she was able to do it because the laws that were in place when the Republic created in the trace all the way back to the Spanish times and the community property laws so it's very fascinating to me as a lawyer that you can look now at a building in Downtown Houston trace it through the Republic through the frontier across the ocean all the way back to 1492 and somehow our Founders had the bright ideas on how to have these laws and adapt them to the frontier Societies in ways that would actually come out in a better way for women in that type of society so if you're interested in reading some more and want to look into it these are a couple of free resources Charlton uh law library has all of the Texas constitutions and a lot of the historic documents so you can look at some of the debates that happen read the letters every one of the Texas constitutions from 1836 up until 1845 which we still have all of those are in there along with all the records the Texas Supreme Court Historical Society is also just a treasure Trove of information uh it's say lawyer Society but all of their journals are free so they've got a great search feature if you want to look for anybody on there you can pull up their journals learn more about it very good website for anybody interested in Texas history and the law appable to it so that that's why I called it by her labors and toils because it really was and it resulted in very forward thinking and a good result for a lot of women so with that I'll turn it over uh for questions yes ma'am oh I have a question um I always assume that's how your speech is how it works I want to know why then uh when my parents died they had three daughters no Sons uh everything was divided equal and they made Provisions written provision in their Wills that those uh inheritances went were to go strictly to their daughters uh I guess not that they didn't like their son-in-laws but they wanted their daughters to be sure be provided for sure now when in order to receive that we were all asked to well actually husbands had to sign off on that now if that was the case why is it I was highly insulted and so are my sisters uh we couldn't get it unless it was signed off by the husp it's it's smart lawyering so remember the your bucket my bucket and the community bucket you can make a gift to any one of those three buckets and so that's what they're doing so your dad could have given your husband a gift that was his separate property so he could have left him a shotgun golf clubs whatever that could be his separate property he can give a gift to you whatever it may be he can give that gift to you and you only that's your separate property or he can say here's my property and it winds up in the community bucket because you got that then so what they're doing with that and by requiring it is just making sure everybody's clear on this that inheritance is being made to the women as their separate property only theirs and actually the Carol versus Carol Case get gets into that because Chief Justice Hil talks about the will was a little bit vague on that point and he wrote over it but that's why you would do something like that to be crystal clear it is only going to the women so that way there's no questions at all so that's belt and suspenders lawyering well I was lucky enough to have pry good agree well if he didn't agree she sure yeah that was their PR see I didn't understand yeah you you could it's just being very very clear and by the attorney that drafted that to just there's no they're basic what they're doing actually is depriving thems of a future lawsuit so good on that lawyer for trying to do that so yes okay my ancestor had an 1880 divorce in Harris County so what would that look like would there have been Witnesses in board you know accusing people of adultery and would there be a sleeve in the courthouse records still uh so the first question what would it have looked like it depends on the case it yeah if they decide that that's the way it's going to go there probably could have been a trial um I would think there would be depending on how much one of the spouses wanted to fight it the records may still exist um you can find those there's a good Treasure Trove at the South Texas College of Law Library uh there's also one at the the uh it's the 1910 courthouse downtown but one person that would know exactly where they are is a guy named judge Mark Davidson uh judge Davidson is the guru on all things Houston legal history so he'll be able to help find those for you sir you have an idea of how much Sten F Austin's sister owned and land uh it was it was well over 100,000 acres 100,000 yeah she had she and her husband had taken their own land grant for league in labor had purchased several others and so at the time Steven Austin died in what was it 1837 36 36 then he still had tons of land that had never been given out as colony grants so all of that went to her across multiple counties so when you look at her wealth and then how she and her husband work together to manage it it's really fascinating uh cuz she never expected to be put in that position and so she not only made that work she taught a local school near her journals are just fascinating some of her observations about Texas history are just really really cool uh but yeah it would have been made her the largest in Texas by far to follow to sometimes you been here for programs we do because Sten Was A Bachelor who's running this land inario project for Mexico he's being paid in land so the land that ends up going to his sister who that a right is basically the stuff that Mexico granted to him in response to him bringing immigrants in sub here that's his paycheck at the end of those contracts and you look at our map particular that connecting map both in the current temporary exhibit and in the desk the virtual desk in there Stephen F Austin's name is all over his col because he's cherry-picking places that he predicts will future will be valuable for future development pts or city locations so he owns a ton of money it's actually kind of a tragic story to his fames he had tried to his estate to a nephew who was for and that died before he came of age a sister at the time though that Mexican land was very cheap I'm sure the Mexicans thought that they were giving away nothing sure well um now we go like kind of thousand yeah so Mexico knew what they were getting out of that whole process but Chris kind of brought up Emily um a lot of The Heirs of Emily Austin and the Brian or Perry families ended up owning land that became a key L stone to becoming ranching families or UL cultivation of ring gas properties these are all people that did very well by virtue of having a large stap in yeah so what did do with she made a lot of money during her life at a time when cash money wasn't something you had a whole lot of so she did that had a lot of nieces and nephews and her own kids and so she took care of all of them took care of a lot of the people around her and then ultimately the land got pieced out throughout the family into the various branches like when you say she made money like do I mean different things like cattle on some stor mainly reinvesting it into the land so cattle uh farming Timber and then also a lot of the cash she built a Schoolhouse nearby kept her house very nice for the time which a lot of people weren't able to do with the cash they all have to do on loans so she's able to do that make tons of donations to the neighbors and really just a community pillar is what it became the original Baro site for stost there at the Presbyterian Church in Jones Creek that's right on the edge of the Peach Point Plantation which was 's Homestead she and her husband first all right well U if that's it I sure appreciate the time it is certainly an honor to be here and to talk to you all thank you so much

Channel: Texas Historical Commission

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Id: oh08NxaYhD4

Length: 50min 34sec (3034 seconds)

Published: Wed May 01 2024