Diaries bring 1800s Texas to life

By Amanda Rogers

Mansfield Record

Ever wonder what it was really like to live in Texas in the 1800s, when the Lone Star State was really the Wild West?

Louisa Foster can tell you. Foster, who was one of the original 300 settlers brought to Texas by Stephen F. Austin, wrote a series of journals from 1847-1870, while living in south and central Texas. Her son, John Collier Foster, added his own journals from 1882-1883, before marrying Etta Feild, daughter of Mansfield co-founder Julian Feild.

It was through the Feild family that the 11 journals were donated in the 1980s to the Mansfield Historical Society, where they sat until 2021 when author Jack Crowder was asked to edit the hundreds of pages. The Foster Diaries were published this spring by TCU Press as “The Private Thoughts of a Traveling Preacher’s Wife.” The book is available at the Mansfield Historical Museum, 102 N. Main St., for $27 or online at mansfieldtxhistoricalsociety.org.

Crowder will talk about Louisa Foster and sign books at 6 p.m. Thursday, April 3, at the Man House Museum, 604 W. Broad St. Admission is free.

After spending a year editing her innermost thoughts, Crowder knows Malvina Louisa Foster pretty well.

“She was educated, she was well read and loved to read,” Crowder said. “Her vocabulary – sometimes I had to use the dictionary to look up words. Other times she wrote like she was from the backwoods. She was outspoken and proud to be outspoken. She was very religious. Her husband, Finis, was a Cumberland Presbyterian traveling minister.”

Foster was born on Dec. 3, 1821, on a plantation in southern Alabama, Crowder said. She came to Texas with her family with Austin’s original 300 settlers after her family got a land grant from Spain for 7,000 acres in Matagorda County near the south Texas coast.

She grew up there, married and had a child. Within a year her husband, firstborn child, mother and father died. She and her younger brother inherited the family fortune.

“I gathered that she really felt lost and went to a revival meeting and met Finis,” Crowder said. “She said it was love at first sight. It was 1846.

“Her friends were against her marrying him,” Crowder said. “Finis told her that it would be a hard life. He tried to talk her out of it.

“She started writing right after they were married,” he said. “They had four children that lived. There were about five that died. She described the death of one of her children. I just couldn’t go on. I closed it for a couple of days. It broke my heart.”

Foster didn’t want anyone to read her diaries until after she died, but she did occasionally let her husband or one of her children read a few lines. She wrote about the price of food and clothing and what was going on in the world, the weather, what they had for dinner or going to someone’s house for dinner. She wrote about the hail coming through the plywood roof, swollen rivers and the traveling soap salesman. She mentions buying a sewing machine so she could do sewing for people, raising chickens and selling the eggs.

“After she married her husband, they started selling property to make ends meet,” Crowder said. “In 1860, they moved to LaGrange. Things were looking up. They had horses and cattle.

“While they were in LaGrange, the Civil War started,” he said. “She wrote about Fort Sumter two days after it happened. During the Civil War, they lost all their money. They moved to Austin and lived in a shack.”

Her husband was gone for long periods of time.

“The diaries show her loneliness and the vastness of Texas,” Crowder said. “Louisa said she would like to be the type of writer that other people would read. She wrote toward the end of her life that she will die unknown.”

Although Louisa Foster never lived in Mansfield, she met people that lived here.

Crowder, who graduated from Mansfield High School in 1962, has deep roots in Mansfield. His mother, June Speers, was born in Mansfield, and his great-grandfather settled in Mansfield at the turn of the 20th century.

“I don’t get a penny for editing the book,” Crowder said. “It was an honor to tell her story.”

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