Mary Maverick
[3] On August 4, 1836, Mary Adams married Samuel Augustus Maverick,[1] a Yale graduate who had been the Alamo garrison's delegate to the Convention of 1836 declaring Texas' independence from Mexico.
After a brief stop in Tuscaloosa, they left for the Republic of Texas on December 7, accompanied by her fifteen-year-old brother, Robert Adams, and three additional slaves.
[7] On February 4, they rented rooms at the home of George Sutherland, and for four months Maverick remained there while her husband continued on to San Antonio.
[9] In her memoirs, she claims to have been the first U.S.-born female to settle in San Antonio, but letters to her mother mentioned another American lady, married to an Irishman, who died shortly after the Mavericks arrived.
[17] During his business trip, Sam sold many of his lands in South Carolina and Alabama, and bought two years worth of provisions, which he had shipped to Linville, Texas.
On March 6, the sixth anniversary of the fall of the Alamo, Maverick received word that San Antonio had fallen to Santa Anna.
On April 30 he left Maverick alone there while he returned to Alabama to get her younger sister, Elizabeth, who had been living as a boarder since her mother died the previous year.
[23] Samuel Maverick returned to San Antonio without his family in late August 1842 to argue a case before the district court.
The Mexican army, under General Adrian Woll, surrounded San Antonio and captured the small number of Anglo-American men in the city.
Mary Maverick's brothers participated in the Battle of the Salado on September 18, where their company ambushed some of the Mexican soldiers, killing 60 of them.
Her memoirs relate her attempts to revive the then-dying art of homespun cloth production to supply the needs of the Confederate cause.
A devout Episcopalian, she was instrumental in establishing St. Mark's Church in San Antonio and served as president of the Ladies' Parish Aid Society.
She helped promote the annual Battle of Flowers celebration, and devoted effort to the restoration and preservation of the Alamo as an historic site.
Mary Maverick's writings, in particular her eyewitness account of the Council House Fight in San Antonio in 1840, are often cited in studies of Texas pioneer life.
Allegedly, her face was severely disfigured, with her nose entirely burned away, a detail which has been commonly included in Texas history descriptions of the incident since the publications of the Maverick memoirs in 1895.
Neither Col. Hugh McLeod mentioned any abuse in his report of March 20, 1840 (commenting on the intelligence of the girl but nothing like a missing nose), nor any other Texas officials at the time nor Matilda Lockhart's own sister-in-law, who was in San Antonio, in a letter written to her own mother shortly after the release.
Anderson writes: "While published in the 1890s, this description has been used by historians to claim that the massacre came about as a result of the justifiable rage of Texas men.
Yet none of the Texas officials claimed this to be the case at the time; evidence of abuse is conspicuously missing in the primary documents, however no reliable narrative counters it.
