Mary Maverick

My Great, Great Grandma, Mary Maverick

Mary Ann Adams Maverick (March 16, 1818 – February 24, 1898), was an early Texas pioneer and author of memoirs which form an important source of information about daily life in and around San Antonio during the Republic of Texas period through the American Civil War.

Mary Ann Adams was born in Alabama, to William Lewis Adams, a lawyer, and Agatha Strother (Lewis) Adams. Her maternal grandmother was a cousin of James Madison while her father's family had founded Lynchburg, Va.

On August 4, 1836, Mary Adams married Samuel Augustus Maverick, a Yale graduate who had been the Alamo’s delegate to the convention of 1836, declaring  Texas’s independence from Mexico.

In her memoirs, she claims to have been the first U.S.-born female to settle in San Antonio. Shortly after moving into a new home along the San Antonio River, Maverick gave birth to her second child, Lewis Antonio Maverick, who became the first Anglo-American child to be born in and grow up in San Antonio.

Mary Maverick bore ten children over a span of 21 years. Four died of illness before the age of eight

“In her memoirs, she also described the joys and heartbreaks of raising a growing family in the uncertain shadow of Indian raids, military invasions and deadly diseases. A youthful sense of wonder comes through in her wide-ranging accounts of fleeing an invading Mexican army, of making do with living quarters in a corncrib, of meeting generals and presidents. Sprinkled throughout are other memorable vignettes--of a grand procession to San Antonio's church of San Fernando behind "twelve young girls dressed in spotless white" and a platform-borne statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe; of a dance in which the president of the Republic of Texas, Mirabeau B. Lamar, has trouble getting his arm around the waist of the rotund wife of San Antonio's mayor, Juan Seguin; of the deathbed vigils for two beloved daughters."

Indeed, as historian Paula Mitchell Marks writes in the foreword, these memoirs form “a valuable record of Texas history and a personal story of endurance and grace.”