Emily Margaret Brown Austin Bryan Perry

Emily Perry's Texas years show most clearly in 1836 and 1848. In the Runaway Scrape she and her children fled to a ship on Galveston Bay, close enough to hear the guns at San Jacinto. Her brother Stephen F. Austin, who thought the panic nearly cost the colony, told her to stay home and abide the fate of Texas. In 1848 Rutherford B. Hayes described her as nurse and spiritual adviser to a whole settlement of slaves, a picture drawn by a guest, not by the people held there. She died at Peach Point on August 15, 1851.

What the plaque says

Emily Margaret Brown Austin Bryan Perry (1795-1851) Born near Austinville, Virginia, as was her brother Stephen Fuller Austin (1793-1836), Emily moved with her father Moses Austin (1761-1821) and mother Maria Brown Austin (1768-1824) to Missouri in 1798. The family operated lead mines there and founded the town of Potosi, south of St. Louis. Emily was sent to schools in Kentucky and New York and returned to Missouri in 1812. She married James Bryan (1788-1822) in 1813 and gave birth to five children at Hazel run, Missouri. After James died, Emily subsisted by taking boarders and teaching school. She married James Franklin Perry (1795-1853) in 1824 in Missouri; their union produced six children. By the end of 1831, the Perry family-- including Emily, James, four Bryan children, two Perry children, James' niece, and nine slaves-- had joined Emily's brother Stephen in Texas. They settled at San Felipe and built a house at Stephen's Peach Point Plantation, providing a home and counsel for her bachelor brother. The Bryan and Perry offspring contributed greatly to the development of Texas. Emily's sons served as soldiers and statesmen, and preserved the Austin bloodline. Emily died at Peach Point shortly after a trip to Philadelphia, and was buried here at Gulf Prairie Cemetery. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836 - 1986

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Levi Jordan Plantation State Historic Site — 11 mi
  A sugar and cotton plantation on the San Bernard River whose enslaved builders and their descendants left one of the best-preserved African American archeological sites in Texas.
• Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge — 12 mi
  Coastal prairie, salt marsh and bays between Freeport and Christmas Bay, where an auto tour along Big Slough passes wintering geese, ducks and wading birds in the tens of thousands.
• Varner-Hogg Plantation State Historic Site — 16 mi
  A Brazos sugar plantation built by enslaved people for the Patton family, later leased convict labor and Hogg family oil, now told through Rachel Patton and Sarah Ford.

More markers nearby

• William Joel Bryan — steps away
• Major James Peckham Caldwell — steps away
• Henry William Munson — steps away
• James Franklin Perry — steps away