Margaret M. Lea Houston

Margaret Lea was twenty-one when she married a man twenty-six years older with a name for drinking, and her family apparently opposed it. The Handbook of Texas says she led him to give up liquor by telling him it hurt her, not by nagging. Her asthma kept her home, so she built a house meant to draw him back. Its household included fourteen enslaved people, about five of them house servants under her maid, Aunt Eliza. Widowed in 1863, she moved to Independence and died of yellow fever there in 1867, buried at once.

What the plaque says

Margaret M. Lea Houston Margaret Moffette Lea wife of Gen Sam Houston; April 11, 1819 - Dec. 3, 1867; and her mother Nancy Moffette Lea; May 1, 1780 - Feb. 7, 1864; women of character, culture and staunch devotion to their families and church, each in her own way greatly influenced the career of Sam Houston and the course of Texas history. (1965)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Independence and Old Baylor Park — 0.5 mi
  A crossroads north of Brenham that was the richest town in Texas when it won Baylor University in 1845, refused the railroad, and lost the college to Waco and Belton in 1886.
• Washington-on-the-Brazos State Historic Site — 11 mi
  The townsite on the Brazos where delegates met in a cold, unfinished hall in March 1836 to declare Texas independent, with Independence Hall rebuilt and Anson Jones's Barrington farm worked as in 1850.
• Star of the Republic Museum — 12 mi
  A star-shaped museum of the Republic of Texas years, 1836 to 1846, built at Washington-on-the-Brazos after a Brenham campaign and opened on March 1, 1970.
• Navasota — 16 mi
  A railroad and cotton town where the La Bahia Road crossed the Navasota River, scarred by an 1865 explosion and yellow fever, and the home ground of the songster Mance Lipscomb.

More markers nearby

• Old Baptist Church — steps away
• The Nancy Lea Bell — steps away
• Site of Independence School — steps away
• Site of Mustering of a Unit of Hood's Texas Brigade, C.S.A. — steps away