Anna Moore Schwein

The Ledger's account of her 1881 marriage shows how the law turned on her. A white waiter at the St. James Hotel, C. W. Schweine, applied after dark for a license, which the county clerk issued to a Miss A. E. Crauser. When the clerk learned she was Annie Moore, a young Black woman and mother of two, the paper reported, the groom left town and she crossed the bay to take a school. Her 1946 obituary adds that she was a charter member of the city's First Congregational Church for Negroes, joining at eighteen.

What the plaque says

Anna Moore Schwein Born enslaved to parents Alvina (d. 1910) and Samuel Moore, Anna Moore Schwein was a longtime educator in Corpus Christi whose later interviews give insight into the town's early history. Her mother was one of the first enslaved persons brought to the area, arriving in 1849 with the Baskin family from Mississippi. Her father was brought by John Marks Davenport Moore, originally from Georgia. Anna (Annie) was born in New Braunfels and brought to Corpus Christi by Rebecca Britton before she was four. In one of her interviews, Anna recalled that the 1862 Battle of Corpus Christi caused Rebecca Britton to flee for safety, bringing her four enslaved persons, including young Anna, to Nuecestown, twelve miles inland. Anna recollected that she could still hear the cannons. After emancipation, Anna attended a variety of schools, including Catholic schools, public schools, and those taught by Rev. Aaron Rowe, Catherine Bray and Mary Eliza Dix. Anna's first two children, Adelaide and Henry, were born in 1874 and 1879, respectively. On January 30, 1881, she married C.W. Schwein, but their bi-racial marriage was against the law at the time. Schwein left the family a few months later, leaving Anna expecting her third child, William, and taking a new position as a school teacher. Anna never remarried. She worked for many years teaching primary school, acting as principal of the Coles School later in her career. After she retired from teaching, she was employed as a laundress and seamstress. Anna died at the age of 89 and was buried in the Old Bayview Cemetery. (2023)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mirador de la Flor — 0.6 mi
  Corpus Christi's bayfront memorial to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, the Tejano singer from this city, killed in 1995 at twenty-three, visited by about thirty thousand people a year.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 0.8 mi
  Philip Johnson's 1972 museum on the Corpus Christi bayfront, joined in 2006 by Ricardo Legorreta's Miller Wing, holding more than 2,000 works mostly from Texas and the Americas.
• Texas State Aquarium — 1.0 mi
  A nonprofit aquarium on the tip of Corpus Christi Beach built around the Gulf and the Caribbean, with the largest coastal wildlife rescue center in Texas behind the exhibits.
• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 1.2 mi
  An Essex-class carrier of 1943 moored off North Beach, the Blue Ghost that Tokyo Rose kept reporting sunk, and the Navy's training carrier for nearly three decades after.

More markers nearby

• Louis de Planque — steps away
• John Dix — steps away
• James Downing — steps away
• Old Bayview Cemetery — steps away