ANNA HENRIETTE MEBUS MARTIN (1843-1925)
Mason
County rancher and banker, daughter of Alvin
(or Allwell) and Henriette or Henrietta (Martin) Mebus, was born on the Rhine
near Cologne, Germany, on December 10, 1843, the eldest of six children.
In 1858 her father's business in Solingen
failed, and in October the family sailed from Bremen to Galveston, where they
arrived on Anna Mebus's fifteenth birthday. They settled in Mason County at
Hedwig's Hill, which was named by Anna Mebus's maternal uncle after his mother.
The genteel, city-bred Germans knew nothing
of farming but soon found themselves plowing, milking cows, raising hogs, and
contending with the constant threat of Indian depredations. In December 1859
Anna married her cousin Charles (or Karl) Martin, a merchant who ran a small
store at Hedwig's Hill; they had two sons. During the Civil War Martin, a staunch Republican, lost his store and
contracted inflammatory rheumatism that left him an invalid from 1864 to his
death in November 1879.
Responsibility for the family's finances fell
on Anna Martin, who borrowed $150 to purchase groceries and reopened the store.
The San Antonio-El Paso Mail line passed by the Martin house, and in 1866 Charles
was appointed postmaster. Soon the store became a regular stop for the stages;
Anna Martin boarded the horses, sold a few groceries to travelers, made butter,
sewed, and served as postmistress of Hedwig's Hill.
With her small supply of capital, she added
dry goods to her stock of groceries and began to exchange them for cattle; she
also hauled freight and carried on an extensive business as a wool and cotton
buyer. She preferred to buy directly from cattle and sheep ranchers, a practice
that gave her an advantage over those who waited for them to come to market.
She sold the first barbed wire used for fencing in Mason County. She reputedly sold
more of the wire than any other firm in West Texas. In time she was able to
acquire extensive holdings-some 50,000 acres-in Mason, Llano, and Gillespie
counties.
Now one of the wealthiest German-Texan citizens,
Anna Martin gave up her store and established the Commercial Bank of Mason on
July 1, 1901; she ran it with her sons. Her financial acumen and
trustworthiness led ranchmen to trust her. As president of the bank she was
perhaps the only woman chief executive officer of any bank in America in her
day; she remained president for twenty-four years, and for fifty-seven years
the bank was almost entirely the property of the Martin family.
In a letter to a New York banker interested
in her history, she wrote, "I heard men say, o, she is only a woman, but I
showed them what a woman could do."
Anna Martin died on July 10, 1925, and is
buried in the family cemetery at Hedwig's Hill.
https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/martin-anna-henriette-mebus
You can read so-called history that states women in 19th century America could not own property of their own, and that a married woman's inherited property passed to her husband.
In Texas, all that is pure BS. Since the days of the Republic of Texas, women owned property on their own. The Republic and the State of Texas had and have community property laws -- a husband and a wife share ownership of any property gained during the duration of a marriage. And, a woman entering marriage often filed with county clerk's offices a listing of her property.
Most history, it is a good idea to look for facts on your own. That is particularly a good rule when reading anything by Progressives and feminists.
