USA > Texas > Prominent women of Texas > Part 8
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Her first public appearance after her return from Ger- many was at Houston, her next at Galveston; in both these cities her marvelous renditions elicited instant and hearty applause. The press at once recognized her merit, and was most lavish in its praise. Every incident in the young life of the débutante assumed an interest that gave it value to
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the writers of current history ; and, to add to the attractions toward which the public gravitates, the sweet singer pre- sents a commanding presence, a graceful figure, and features of classic beauty and proportion. She receives the public applause with rare good sense, and with a poise altogether unique in one so young in years.
MISS MAMIE VAN ZANDT was born in Texas in 1861, and is the granddaughter of Signor Antonio Blitz. Her musical gifts are a direct inheritance from her mother, Mrs. Jennie Van Zandt, who was forced through financial reverses to make her talents available. Mamie's voice, even in childhood, was remarkable for range and quality. In 1873 she entered a convent in London, where she received careful instruction, and where she was associated with Adelina Patti, who ad- vised her to train for an operatic career. She studied with Lamperti in Milan, Italy, and in 1879 made her début in Turin, appearing as Zerlina. Her triumph was flattering and led to her second appearance in "La Somnambula." In 1880 she sang in Her Majesty's Opera Company in Lon- don, and a year later made her début in Paris in the Opera Comique in "Mignon." She sang in Paris four seasons and has sung in the principal musical centers of Europe. Her repertory is extensive. She has won great renown and ranks as one of the foremost sopranos of the period.
MISS GRACE KNIGHT has many brilliant gifts and accom- plishments. She is well read in the English classics, a linguist, a proficient in music and a writer of prose and verse. Many of her sketches, which have found their way into Northern periodicals, give evidence of her literary and dramatic talent. The deference shown her by the literati sanctions the homage paid her intellect, while the critics speak in praise of her dramatic power, which she has fre- quently exerted for the benefit of charitable causes. Miss Knight's home is in Austin. She is at present in Paris, France, for the purpose of improving her vocal gifts, which have been greatly admired even in that land of golden voices.
MISS MARGUERITE FISHER.
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MRS. JOHN O. CARR is a descendant of Revolutionary ancestors. Her grandfather, Maj. John Burnham, served on General Washington's staff, and she is connected by lineal descent and marriage with Thomas Jefferson and many of the oldest families in the South. She has received a liberal edu- cation, to which she has added the accomplishments that embellish social life. Mrs. Carr possesses a voice of fine quality and compass, literary tastes, and conversational powers, which fit her to become a valued member of the musical and literary clubs of her city. Her home is in Houston, where she has elevated the standard of musical culture, and where her vocal gifts have won for her a high place among contemporary musicians.
MRS. T. ATLEE COLEMAN will be remembered as Miss Birdie Keran. Her vocal talent has been frequently exerted in the noble cause of charity, and she maintains her reputa- tion as an excellent and sympathetic musician. Possessing natural gifts of a high order she has enjoyed the advantages of generous and careful culture. She graduated with dis- tinction in Virginia and completed her musical studies in Boston under the supervision of Prof. J. Harvy Wheeler. While Mrs. Coleman has acquired la maladie of perfection in music, this proficiency has not been attained at the expense of the domestic virtues, for above all it is in her delightful home in San Antonio that she finds her most attractive setting.
CHAPTER XIII.
MRS. ARTHUR BORNEFELDT-MRS. GABRIEL JORDAN- - MISS ZULEMA GARCIA -MISS DORA VELESCO BECKER-MRS. JAMES BOLTON.
MRS. ARTHUR BORNEFELDT, nee Miss Mamie Fowler, has fortunately possessed the best opportunities for the cul- tivation of her musical gifts. Her progress, while a pupil of William Mason, and of A. R. Parsons, of New
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York, combined with additional European study, resulted in the high ideals and standards of excellence that have given her first rank in musical circles. She is well known as a pianist. Her performance is that of an interpreter familiar with the vast field of musical art. Mrs. Bornefeldt is a Galvestonian, and directress of the Ladies Musical Club of that city, an organization composed of representative women, possessing wealth and cultivation. In this at- mosphere she commands extensive influence, and is noted for her graceful manners and refinement.
MRS. GABRIEL JORDAN has been for many years a resi- dent of Houston, where her late husband was a prominent figure in railroad circles, being, at the time of his death, pres- ident of three railroad companies.
Mrs. Jordan finds a ready appreciation for her social and musical gifts in that city, where an atmosphere of refinement pervading the higher walks of social and intellectual life, in- vites the expansion of her chief accomplishment. With this noble gift, which the Greeks selected as the master science, and over which presided the celestial Nine, she holds her audience in a spell of melody and vies with the muses in their sweet influences, while around her cluster other charming graces of social life, adorned by travel and contact with congenial spirits, thus developing by intellectual friction the higher social qualities.
Her daughter, Mrs. Martin Lee, has a voice of superior excellence and beauty.
MISS ZULEMA GARCIA .- " Pianist, artist, composer"- as she is addressed in a letter from Madame Victoria Fiosilli, directress of the Neapolitan Conservatory of Art, is a young Texan, who has acquired a world-wide celebrity. She was born at San Antonio, of Castilian parentage, distin- guished not only by birth and lineage, but also for talent, mental cultivation, and refinement.
Miss Garcia's remarkable musical talent was cultivated at an early age under the supervision of the best musical
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professors of San Antonio, and completed under the cele- brated Marmontel of Paris, who predicted a brilliant future for the talented young artist. His prophecy has been ful- filled. Miss Garcia has received seven gold medals-four of which are for musical achievements.
She was the youngest lady manager appointed from any State to the World's Fair in Chicago, and while there re- ceived the same distinguished attentions which have been accorded her in all the other large cities which she has visited.
Among other compliments paid Miss Garcia .at the World's Fair was the rendition of her now world-wide pop- ular "Columbus March," by Sousa's band, afterwards taken up by. the Iowa State and other State bands.
Another one of her compositions rendered and popular- ized by the Elgin band of Illinois, at the Fair, was Miss Gar- cia's "Texas Spring Palace Waltz."
She is still in her teens, has composed over eighty pieces of music, and, as a pianist, violinist, and guitarist, is a mu- sical marvel. In appearance, to quote from The Gulf Mes- senger : "Miss Garcia possesses the rare beauty and grace of the Castilian people. She is petite, vivacious, has a face of winning sweetness and beautiful dark eyes, and resembles the world-renowned songstress, Adelina Patti."
Her delightful home in San Antonio, is one of the oldest and most interesting residences in the city, and there the proverbial hospitality of a Spanish greeting is generously ex- tended by its lovely hostess to those who call upon her.
MISS DORA VELESCO BECKER is of Hungarian parent- age. She was born in Galveston, Texas, and early in life gave evidence of remarkable skill as a volinist. This talent was a direct inheritance from her mother, who had always exhibited the greatest desire to become proficient in music though her wish had never been gratified. Her father was conductor of the Galveston Singing Society and it was in this city she made her début at the age of seven. At a sec- ond concert given two years later, she received many hand- some presents of jewelry, and a beautiful three-quarter-sized
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violin as evidences of appreciation from her auditors. Miss Becker then continued her studies under competent teachers; Reimendhl, Sam. Franko, Carl Richter, Richard Arnold, and other instructors of note. Her New York début took place in Steinway Hall. She was then only ten years of age. Six years later she entered the Royal Academy of Music at Ber- lin. At a preliminary examination no less than eighty young instrumentalists played ; of these only seven were ad- mitted to the High School, Miss Becker being one of the number who passed the ordeal successfully. She was im- mediately selected as the pupil of the great Joseph Joachim and of Professor Kruse.
MRS. JAMES BOLTON .- The last rose crowning this chap- let of musicians of Texas is Mrs. James Bolton, of Whites- boro, formerly Miss Linda Tideman. Having spent five years of study in Chicago, and at the Boston Conservatory of Music, Mrs. Bolton has not only acquired the technique of the one art which we are assured will be exercised in heaven, but likewise she is a thoroughly educated musical artist. .
She has not only reached the highest point of excellence possible in instrumental music, but has also the proficiency in that scientific knowledge of her art which makes her a maestro fully capable of imparting her knowledge and methods to others. As a teacher she is unrivaled. Her tastes, as well as her temperament, are those of an artist.
Filled with those heaven-born aspirations which ever foster the divine discontent which elevates the soul, she possesses the gift of that philosophic spirit which teaches one to accept their limitations. Exiled from the musical at- mosphere in which her powers have been developed, she is still, and ever will be, a worshiper at the shrine of the symphonies. Hence, following the lessons of Wagner, she makes her unerring taste in the arrangement of public en- tertainments only an aid to her intensified devotion to St. Cecilia. Euterpe and Polyhymnia.
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Blest with an attractive personality, she charms as much by her winning presence as by her rarely handsome face and form. To these advantages Mrs. Bolton joins the added grace which is the result of having been reared in an atmos- phere of culture and refinement among her relatives and family connections.
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CHAPTER XIV.
PROMINENT AUTHORS.
MRS. AUGUSTA EVANS WILSON-MRS. MAUD J. YOUNG-MRS. LEE C. HARBY-MRS. AMELIA E. BARR.
MRS. AUGUSTA EVANS WILSON. - Fifty years ago the subject of this sketch, then a little girl, came with her parents to Texas from the State of Georgia, where she was born. The family, after brief sojourns in Galveston and Houston, located in San Antonio, and there resided about three years. Mrs. Wilson refers to this residence as a " blessed dream," and, in speaking of the influence of her en- vironments during these happy years, she says: "The pic- turesque scenery and historic associations of quaint old San Antonio were important factors in directing my life along literary lines." Andit is but natural that a child of her pre- cocious gifts and susceptive age, daily gazing upon the storied Alamo and dwelling among a people who nursed a century's thrilling reminiscences, should be impressed beyond the touch of time's effacing hand. Her impressions lingered, and they inspired the story of "Inez, a tale of the Alamo." This was her first literary work, and was completed at seven- teen years of age. The name of Augusta J. Evans then took its place on the roll of Southern writers. Her home was then, as now, the city of Mobile, Alabama, to which her par- ents had removed from Texas, and where, as in earlier years, she still prosecuted her studies under the careful tuition of her highly cultured mother. At the age of twenty-three, she wrote "Beulah;" then followed "Vashti;" "At the Mercy of
W. of T .- 7
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Tiberius," and other productions, that fixed her status in the class of authors distinguished for wealth of language, exu- berance of thought, and resources richly freighted with stores of literary exploration and scientific study.
In all her writings, whether published in books or in the more fugitive form of periodicals and newspaper contri- butions, the quality most conspicuously in evidence is a hearty honesty in declaring the truth as she believes it, and the feature most prominent in her style is her phenomenal command of vivid and technical expression.
Without perverting the functions of romance from their legitimate office of entertainment, she has employed them to edify her readers, thus conveying through the fascinations of a pure ideality the most practical truths in the domain of re- vealed knowledge. Her fiction is, moreover, invested with the dignity of fact, and the narrative thereby excites interest and enforces with subtle power the lessons it is intended to teach.
In her married life Mrs. Wilson still pursued with ardor the studies of earlier years, and in her widowhood nature and books are her companions. Her handsome rural home, near Mobile, is the seat of hospitality and the source of un- numbered pleasures and blessings that are daily dispensed by its beloved mistress.
MRS. MAUD J. YOUNG .- There is perhaps no Texan writer who has displayed greater versatility in the higher walks of literature, or who, in as many of its departments, has achieved better success than Mrs. Young. In prose, in poetry, in belles-lettres, and in natural history, she wrote with equal grace, and in each she gleaned laurels that are not often twined in the same chaplet of fame.
Mrs. Young was the daughter of Col. N. Fuller, of North Carolina, and was born in Beaufort, of that State, in Novem- ber, 1826. She was of distinguished lineage, being related, on one side of her house, to the Rolfs and Randolphs of Virginia, and on the other, to the Dunbars, Braggs and Braxtons of Virginia and Maryland. At the age of twenty,
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she was married to Dr. S. O. Young, of South Carolina, and at twenty-one was left a widow and the mother of a little boy of posthumous birth. After this bereavement she moved to Texas, and lived for many years in the city of Houston, where she died, April 15, 1882.
The best known of Mrs. Young's prose compositions, and the one that best illustrates both the fervor of her muse and the power of her gift for mellifluous expression, is "The Leg- end of Sour Lake." Though not a poem in a metrical sense, it is a creation of the finest poetic fancy, and the smoothness of the narrative makes of it a story of the most melodious prose. In versification, she was no less distin- guished, and her numerous odes, and idyls and lyrics, attest her skill in giving grace and melody to her numbers.
In her later years she adopted the pseudonym of "Patsy Pry," and, over that name, wrote a number of newspaper ar- ticles that elicited flattering comments from the press. The work, however, upon which rests Mrs. Young's most endur- ing fame is her book entitled "Familiar Lessons in Botany," with special reference to the flora of Texas, and bound in an octavo volume of more than six hundred pages. Prior to the appearance of Mrs. Young's publication, the field was unexplored, save in an incidental way by untrained observ- ers. William Kennedy, in 1844, embodied in his little book on Texas some general information on her flora, and five years later Dr. Ferdinand Roemer published in German his personal observations of Texas, to which he appended a sum- mary review of vegetable life in the country, but neither of these writers addressed himself to the naturalist or the stu- dent. It remained for Mrs. Young to pioneer both the re- searches and the publication of one of the most interesting features of Texas inquiry ; and, in doing the work, she has followed the precise and technical methods of teacher and scientist.
MRS. LEE C. HARBY is a South Carolinian by birth, de- scended from Revolutionary ancestors on both sides of her family. She lived for twenty years in Texas, where her
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prominent rank in journalistic fields rendered her famous among the talented women of the State. In 1880 her article in the Magazine of American History, entitled the "City of a Prince," attracted favorable press mention in Russia, Eng- land and Germany, and won for her recognition from the Historical Association of New York. Mrs. Harby is a con- tributor to the New York Home Journal, the Ladies Home Journal, of Philadelphia, the new St. Louis journal, the Chaperone, and the New Orleans Times-Democrat. She has traveled throughout the South in the interest of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper.
MRS. AMELIA E. BARR is well remembered by the early residents of Austin, for it was in this city that she lived from 1856 until 1876. Her first novel, "Jan Vedder's Wife," was bought and published by a New York house. Through this venture she achieved instantaneous success, for the book at- tracted general notice, ran through many editions, and has been widely read on both sides of the ocean, and in several languages. "Remember the Alamo," recalls the stirring episode of the revolt of Texas against Mexican misrule, and Mrs. Barr's volume on this subject is still preserved in many families as a cherished memento of other days. She was a brilliant conversationalist, and old friends attest that it is still a pleasure to recall the feeling of satisfaction experienced in her society. Her family were of ancient and pure Saxon lineage. Reared in the atmosphere of refined culture, she be- came a thorough student, and finds great satisfaction in her literary work. There is no other author in the United States whose writings command a wider circle of readers, and it is said that she is almost worshiped by those who dwell on Storm King Mountain. Her time is spent at Cherry Croft, at Cornwall-on-the-Hudson, New York.
CHAPTER XV.
MRS. A. V. WINKLER-MRS. M. E. WHITTEN-MISS SUSANNA PINCKNEY-MRS. MARY MITCHEL BROWN-MRS. FANNY CHAMBERS GOOCH-MRS. ELLA WILLMAN.
MRS. A. V. WINKLER is a Virginian by birth, her father John Walton and her mother Elizabeth Tate Smith were of English descent, her father a direct heir of Lady Mary Hamilton of Manchester, England. She was educated in the Richmond Female Institute and in 1864, became the wife of Lieutenant Colonel Winkler of the Fourth Texas Regi- ment, who shared the fortunes and misfortunes of Hood's Texas Brigade. His services were conspicuous in all the great battles of Virginia, and ended with the surrender of General Lee at Appomattox. Mrs. Winkler was in Rich- mond during the war, and had an excellent opportunity to observe the stirring events of those unhappy days. The scenes she witnessed and Hood's famous brigade play an im- portant part in the interesting history she has recently pub- lished of her personal reminiscences. This book has been favorably received. The author has told her story well, and has emphasized her strong and leading points with admirably selected extracts from newspaper and official reports, weav- ing the whole together so skillfully that interest never flags.
Mrs. Winkler has contributed popular articles to the Southern Illustrated News and Magnolia published in Rich- mond, Virginia. For three years she edited a literary maga- zine, Corsicana Prairie Flower, and is at present associate editor and business manager of the Round Table, a monthly magazine published in Texas. The newspapers and maga- zines of this and other Southern States have received val- uable contributions from her gifted pen. A lady of rare accomplishments, it has been well said that by her "culture
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and literary attainments she has woven from the sable weeds of widowhood, the bright robes of prosperity and distinction."
MRS. M. E. WHITTEN, author, born in Austin, Texas, is the daughter of Hon. William S. and Hannah B. Hotchkiss. She was educated at the Collegiate Female Institute at Austin and Mckinsey College. While at the latter school her loneliness was voiced in the song, " Do they miss me at home." Contracting a youthful marriage, she was left a widow at twenty-four, without means or knowledge of business. She began teaching and achieved great success as an educator. She has obtained a comfortable home and other property as the material result of her educational and literary efforts. Mrs. Whitten is a versatile writer. Her poems, historical, de- scriptive and joyous, have been collected, and in 1886, were published in book form under the title of "Texas Garlands." She read a poem before a Chautauqua audience on Poets' Day in 1888, and one written by request was read in Tus- cola, Illinois, in 1889, to a large audience. Mrs. Whitten has in preparation a "Sketch Book," which will contain, prose, poetry, letters of travel and fiction. She has been twice married, and her home is in Austin.
MISS SUSANNA PINCKNEY, known to the public as "Miss McPherson," the author of the novel, "Douglas, Tender and True," is the daughter of Thomas S. Pinckney, Esq., who came from South Carolina to Texas in 1836. Her mother was Miss Caroline Finney, of Massachusetts. Miss Sue Pinck- ney, as she is known in society and among her circle of relatives and intimate friends, is one of several children born in Texas after the removal of her parents from South Carolina.
At the death of her mother Miss Pinckney became the sole mistress and manager of her father's household. With two elder brothers in the Confederate army, and her father an invalid, the cares and responsibilities of this young girl, almost a child herself, may be only faintly imagined by those
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Southern women who passed through and survived the ordeal of that fratricidal war, waiting, working, watching and praying for their dear ones in the army at the front, close to the line of duty and of danger.
Even at that early age she evinced talent for expres- sion with the pen by her letters to her brothers and "all the boys" in Company G, 4th Texas Regiment, in far away Virginia.
After the war she wrote several serial stories for Texas papers, but her culminating literary effort finally manifested itself in her "Douglas, Tender and True," which has been so well received by the public and the press as to leave no doubt of the future literary career of Miss Pinckney. The whole spirit which animates the story is worthy of the great- great-grandmother of the writer, that Mrs. Richard Shu- brick, of whom there is a tradition that on one occasion during the Revolution, an American soldier who had sought refuge with her, was defended from a British officer at the risk of her life. Mrs. Shubrick secreted the American in her chamber, and placing herself before the door, said to the English officer who tried to force her aside: "To men of honor the chamber of a lady should be as sacred as the sanctuary. You may succeed in entering mine, but it shall be over my dead body." The officer ceased further search.
MRS. MARY MITCHEL BROWN .- In tracing the genealogy of Mrs. Brown one fact is conspicuous, that is, that from widely divergent lines she is descended from the first immi- grants bearing certain names. Thus, she is seventh in direct descent from John Alden and his wife, Priscilla Molines, who came overin the "Mayflower ;" the seventh from Capt. James Avery and his wife, Joan Greenslade, who came in 1630; and, in like manner, she descends from the first arrivals bearing the names of William Cheesborough, Capt. John Leeds, Wil- liam Denison, Capt. Cary Latham, Capt. William Morgan, John Masters, Edward Sterling, John Dymond, Benjamin Shopeley, and Capt. François Michel, an exile from France in 1740. Mrs. Brown was born in the heroic and patriotic
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village of Groton, Connecticut, in whose cemetery repose since 1684 (the first interment) to 1895, eleven generations of her relatives, including her father, Capt. David Mitchel, and her mother, Lucy Avery. Mrs. Brown was partly educated in Connecticut, and completed her course by three years' attend- ance upon Franklin Academy, long since Harford University, Pennsylvania. Recent publications of that institution speak of her, Miss Mary F. Mitchel, as possessing one of the bright- est minds that ever graced that seat of learning. After leav- ing Pennsylvania, Miss Mitchel visited a brother then living in Missouri. There she met, and on the 9th of July, 1843, married, John Henry Brown, of Texas, then on a visit to his native place, Ashley, Pike County, Missouri.
In the intervening fifty-two years she has been a faithful daughter of Texas, sharing at different times the vicissitudes of a new country. During the Civil War, her husband, and sometimes both sons (Julius R. and Pierre M. Brown) were in the army. After the war, the entire family passed five years in Mexico, principally in the "Texan Valley," where Mrs. Brown, by her kind and gentle intercourse, so won the hearts of the Mexicans, that, when it was known she would return to the United States, they came from all directions, on ponies, in canoes, and on foot, to bid her farewell.
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