Leah Moncure, P.E.

Moncure's license came the long way round. She taught math in Houston for a year, then drafted and laid grade lines on county roads for a consulting firm. In the Depression she entered the University of Texas engineering program, stopping repeatedly to work in district engineers' offices for tuition, and finished in 1937. As Engineer No. 2250 she was the only woman on the state's roster for nearly fifteen years. At the Highway Department her work ran to traffic research, intersection channelizing, embankment settlement and expansion joints. Her twin sister wrote her biography in 1977.

What the plaque says

Leah Moncure, P.E. (June 7, 1904 - January 17, 1972) As the Texas Highway Department's first female engineer, Leah Moncure, P.E., broke barriers at a time when the engineering field was dominated by men. Leah was born in Bastrop to Cassius Lee (C.L.) Moncure, a Bastrop County Surveyor and a civil engineer, and Hattie Nuckols Moncure. The family moved into a house on Main Street in 1911. At an early age, Leah showed an interest in the surveying profession and became familiar with tools, materials and methods, often acting as a draftsman for her father. Early on, doctors predicted that Leah would not grow into adulthood as she was born with a congenital heart defect. However, Leah persevered. She graduated in 1925 from Baylor University with high honors and a double major in mathematics and education. As she looked for an engineering opportunity, she found her options limited. Moncure taught in Houston for a year before working for a consulting firm. Realizing that she needed a degree in civil engineering to pursue the career of her dreams, Leah enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin), School of Engineering and graduated in 1937. On April 22, 1938, Leah Moncure became Engineer No. 2250, the state's first woman to register as a professional engineer and the only licensed female for a number of years. Moncure also became the first female life member of the National Society of Professional Engineers. Moncure worked for the Texas Highway Department for 32 years, specializing in research, right-of-way, and road design in east Texas and Austin. Leah retired in 1964 and moved back to her childhood home on Main Street. In 1965, a scholarship for female engineering students at UT Austin was established in her name. Moncure died in 1972 and is buried in Bastrop's Fairview Cemetery. (2020)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bastrop State Park — 2.0 mi
  The westernmost loblolly pines in the United States, cut off from the East Texas forest by a hundred miles of post oak, burned almost entirely in 2011 and growing back.
• Texas Wendish Heritage Museum — 20 mi
  A museum at Serbin of the Wends, a Slavic people from Lusatia whose congregation of nearly 600 crossed on the Ben Nevis in 1854, losing seventy-three to cholera on the way.
• McKinney Falls State Park — 24 mi
  Limestone falls on Onion Creek inside Austin, where people camped under a rock overhang for thousands of years and a financier of the Texas Revolution built his stone ranch house.
• George Washington Carver Museum — 26 mi
  East Austin's museum of Black history and culture, grown from a segregated branch library moved across town in 1933, with a permanent exhibit on Juneteenth at its core.

More markers nearby

• Site of Bastrop Military Institute — steps away
• Bastrop Methodist Church — 0.3 mi
• Mina Ward School — 0.3 mi
• First Baptist Church of Bastrop — 0.3 mi