THE TAYLOR-STEVENSON FAMILIES: A TRUE HOUSTON STORY

The Taylor Brothers, Edward Wyllys and Horace Dickinson, were descended from a distinguished New England family. Their father, Congregationalist minister Rev. James Taylor, founded Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts.

In 1838, Edward (1814-1886) sailed to Texas and went into the mercantile business in Independence, Texas. It wasn't long before his younger brother Horace (1821-1890) joined him. After Texas became a state, the brothers moved to Houston.

Edward owned a warehouse located on the northeast corner of Travis and Commerce, site of today's Spaghetti Warehouse. In a second building, Edward operated a commission merchant business and forwarding agency. As part of his business, he acted as a cotton and slave broker.

Horace lived and worked in the warehouse. According to a letter he wrote to one of his sisters on September 21, 1848, "You must know that most of the cotton raised in the country comes to this place for a market, some twenty thousand bales was shipped from this place last year. Most of the cotton is stored in large town houses and weighed before shipping. Edward has rented two of those houses the attendance of which keep us both busy. One of these two houses is situated some seventy or eighty feet upon a high bank overlooking the Bayou Steam Route when loading can receive the cotton right aboard by rolling it down the bank on timbers prepared for that purpose. We have also a large warehouse being finished off for the storage of goods to be forwarded into the country."

The Port of Houston extended behind the Taylor brothers' warehouse and cotton yard. They eventually built a "chute in the back of the warehouse where cotton was dropped down the bank of the bayou to waiting steamboats and barges below."

Horace lived in a corner of the warehouse until his marriage on December 1, 1852. The entrance to the warehouse was on the second floor, and led down to the lower level, which was used for storage. Apparently Horace's room was on the third floor, above the street entrance to the warehouse.

During a cholera epidemic in January 1850, the Taylors housed "some dozen negros and white men all streached out upon the floor some of them sick but most of them doing some good snoring. The fact of the case is this, we have some immigrants just arrived from Alabama and the cholera or some other disease is among them and we have turned the ware house into a temporary hospital. . . . My room is right overhead and is pretty comfortable. There is nothing like Brussels carpet or anything of the sort to litter up my room. Everything is quite plain but not always neat. I console myself that I shall not always live an old bachelor's life."

There apparently was some vacant land around the warehouse near the banks of Buffalo Bayou, for Horace reports that, in July 1850, his new buggy horse "was turned loose in the pasture and immediately started for the Bayou which partly surrounds the ground, and he plunged in and swam to the opposite shore. It being very boggy he could not get out and was soon entangled in vines. The prospects were fair for his drowning, so I plunged in and broke the vines which held him. He then succeeded in reaching shore again and finally got on solid ground nearly exhausted."

In 1850, Edward was elected Alderman of the Fourth Ward and formed a partnership with William Marsh Rice, founder of Rice University. On December 15, 1851, he moved his family into an elegant new townhouse near the Rices and Grays and other prominent Houston families around Courthouse Square.

Edward later went into real estate, and then became a fire insurance agent. During the 1870s, he helped organize State Fairs in Houston. He was also a distinguished Mason, serving in the Holland Lodge No. 1 and the Ruthven Commandery No. 2, Knights Templar, as well as a member of Volunteer Fire Protection Company No. 1, which he had joined immediately after arriving in Houston in 1838. This was a social organization whose "soirees were high toned affairs."

After forming his partnership with Rice, Edward sold his cotton commission business to Horace. In 1852, Horace and his new bride, Emily Baker, moved into Edward's former home at the corner of Smith and Preston, site of today's Wortham Theater Center.

In 1866, Horace was elected Houston's twentieth mayor. In 1888, Horace Taylor's business was renamed "H. D. Taylor and Sons, Wholesale Grocers and Cotton Factors." He died on November 9, 1890, and is buried in Glenwood Cemetery.

Edward Ruthven Taylor (1845-1927), the only son of Edward Wyllys and Caroleen Taylor, was called "Bud" when he was a boy. While fighting for the South in Vicksburg, Mississippi, during the Civil War, Ed contracted tuberculosis and was released as a prisoner of war and returned home to Houston to recuperate.

Ed's father had the perfect slave to take care of his ailing son. Her name was Ann George, a 21-year-old Negro woman "with a sympathetic and sweet nature." Edward had bought her on July 15, 1856, from the Hudgins Ranch in Hungerford, Texas. "She did her job well and carefully nursed her patient back to health, staying on as servant in the house after emancipation. Ed became very attached to her. About 1870 he purchased a 640-acre ranch about ten miles south of town, and the two moved out there. Their first child was born that year.

"Since it was illegal for whites to marry blacks, theirs was a common-law marriage. Ed's decision to live with Ann and to be a father to his child was a radical move, although interracial marriages were much more common right after the Civil War than before or later. Prior to the Civil War, the usual practice of a slave owner who fathered a child by a slave, was to merely add another name to his list of servants."

The ranch was located in the township of Pierce Junction, which was named after the intersection where the Houston Tap Railroad met the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado line. It is now part of the City of Houston.

E. R. Taylor was not known for an aggressive approach to life. He enjoyed riding out for a hunt with friends; reading on the wide, clapboard porch of the homestead; propping up his feet for a snooze; and playing with his growing family.

Mollie Taylor Stevenson remembered her grandfather as a tall, thin white man, most often found sitting down. A white beard covered his neck and rested on his strong, lean chest. She remembers his boots propped up on a desk, a weathered ten-gallon hat resting on his head. "Your grandmother wouldn't have tolerated this if she was still here," he would tell little Mollie, eyeing his boots.

One of the Taylor relatives living in the east remembered her Uncle Ed coming for a visit. "‘He was tall and handsome and attracted attention on the streets of New York in his big gray hat, no collar and high boots.'"

E. R. Taylor was also an educated man who firmly believed in learning as a means to success. He taught Ann Taylor to read and their children were among the first Texas blacks to receive a formal education. They went to Tillotson College in Austin. That standard of excellence would be carried over to their children's children and continues today. All but one of Ann and E. R. Taylor's children returned from college to live on the ranch.

It was Ann Taylor who had the indomitable drive. "He was lazy," Mollie Taylor Stevenson once said of E. R. "He was very knowledgeable, but she had the drive. From what I understand, she was hell on wheels. She ruled him and all the others."

When they moved to Pierce Junction, Ed and Ann wanted to grow hay and to raise cattle and turkeys. They had no idea about the valuable resources that lay beneath the soil. "Near the turn of the twentieth century, the family attained notoriety when Ed Taylor's new water well at Pierce Junction turned into a big gas well. In 1906, oil was also found on the property, and Ed Taylor became a wealthy man." The Handbook of Texas Online website states that E. R. Taylor's oil field yielded nearly 89 million barrels through 1984. Working wells still exist on the property. Family folklore also has it that it was Ann Taylor who kept encouraging E. R. Taylor to do further drilling on the property. According to Candyce Rylander, Executive Director of the Houston Parks Board, "She was apparently a very savvy businesswoman."

However, in the 1870s, when Ed invited his nephew, young William Gray, who was seriously ill, to live on the Taylor Ranch, he was working hard to make a living. "Mrs. Gray [Edward's daughter Rosalie] conferred with her late husband's partner, Mr. W. B. Botts, and they agreed that farming might be good for William. Hence William Gray stayed with his Uncle Ed for three years, ‘working from daybreak to after dark,' and he soon recovered his health and eyesight.

"Years later, William Gray wrote about the experience of farming on the ranch. ‘That meant ploughing, planting, ditching, fencing, tree planting, hedge trimming, etc., the usual farm work,' he wrote. He also took part in cattle roundups twice a year which entailed riding sometimes fifty miles a day. ‘In those days the grass on the prairie grew knee to waist high. In the summer I cut prairie-hay with a two-horse mower, from May to September, for sale by car loads, baled and hauled to our big barn. . . . In the spring the prairies were carpeted with the most beautiful wild flowers, and I took large bunches of them when I went to town to spend Sundays. . . . In winter we had fine geese, duck, snipe and other hunting . . . I took books from our library to read at night and in bad weather. . . . I have crawled on my hands and knees for many yards, trying to find out HOW the prairie chicken does his drumming at daybreak. I never could learn.'"

Ann Taylor died in 1909 and Ed, in 1927. "Although together for most of their lives, the two were buried apart. She was laid in a well-hidden grave on the ranch where the grapevines wind around the trees and shelter the plot, where tiny wildflowers grow almost year-round. He was buried in a cemetery for Civil War veterans."

Ed and Ann's oldest child, Pinkie, died in 1976 at the age of 106.

Another child, Major Julius Taylor, married Hester Baker Taylor. They had one daughter, Mollie, who, at the time of her death on April 9, 2003, was the last surviving direct relative of Ed and Ann. According to her obituary in the Houston Chronicle, Mollie had been delivered by two midwives at her parents' home in Pierce Junction. She attended Colored High School in the Fourth Ward in 1923 and graduated from Old Jack Yates High School in 1928.

During this time, she studied classical piano under the direction of Madame Rochan, a New Orleans native. As a graduation present, Mollie's father surprised her with a new Nash automobile and took her on a tour of Europe.

At the ranch, Mollie Taylor worked as hard as any man. "I had to be a boy and a girl," she once said. "I dug post holes, fixed fences, drove cattle. I enjoyed it all." When she wasn't helping to brand cattle or drive them to the salt grass near Freeport, Mollie was dogging her dad. Hunting, fishing, riding, and camping were always her favorite pastimes. She learned the land by being on it.

Mollie refused to kowtow to the racial restrictions of her time. In an interview, she recalled traveling with her father on business to the Harris County courthouse, across the street from the site of her great-grandparents' elegant home. Eyeballing the twin water fountains labeled "whites only" and "blacks," the teenager trotted over for a drink. "I wasn't even thirsty," she said with a grin. "I guess I was moved by spite. A guard called after me to get away from the whites' fountain. I looked up at him, then went back to drinking until my belly hurt. I guess he didn't know what to think of me. When you think about it, it was all so stupid. We couldn't sit at the same lunch counter, or at the same table, but we could take care of their babies and cook their food. We could have poisoned them in their own homes, but we were not safe in the same restaurant."

When it came time for college, Stevenson and her cousins left Texas. She recalled that, "At that time, no Texas college would accept a black student, but they would pay for a black student to leave the state."

Mollie later studied concert piano and organ at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she earned a B.A. in Music in 1934. While at Fisk, she accompanied the famous Fisk Jubilee Singers. She also performed regularly as a guest pianist at The Rice Hotel.

While at Fisk, Mollie met Benjamin Franklin "Big Ben" Stevenson. From Liberty, Missouri, he was a seven-time All-American football player at Tuskegee Institute, where he earned a B.S. degree in Agriculture and Animal Husbandry in 1931.

In 1934, Mollie and Ben moved to Detroit, Michigan, "where they were secretly married. Shortly thereafter, they returned to Houston, and Ben, being the honorable man he was, asked Mollie's father for permission to marry his daughter. The Taylors hosted a lavish wedding reception for their daughter on the lawn of their home."

Ben took a job coaching and teaching at Booker T. Washington High School in Houston, while Mollie kept tabs on "this flock that just seemed to keep popping up." The Stevensons opened the ranch freely to visitors, particularly students from coach Stevenson's team.

Life at the ranch was working well until Mollie Stevenson's grandfather and parents died. It still goes down in Stevenson history as the closest the family came to losing the land. "All hell broke loose," Mollie recalled. "When folks heard E. R. was dead and, not long after, my parents, too, they were scrambling to try and get the [oil] lease on it. All of a sudden, the white relatives were coming out of the woodwork saying they were owed something." And because her husband spent his days at the school, she says, "All of it was dumped on my shoulders. I had to fight whites and blacks. My cattle were stolen. Everyone was trying to take my land."

The court battles taught Mollie Stevenson firsthand about sexism. On the ranch, she was queen of all she surveyed, but in the courtroom, she was a second-class citizen expected to defer to her husband. "It was ridiculous. I was the one who knew what was going on, but the judge wouldn't let me speak." Luckily, thanks to an airtight will left by E. R. Taylor, who foresaw the problems his heirs likely would face, the land and the oil rights remained with the Stevensons.

All of Mollie's and Ben's children graduated from college, and all have a slice of the land. All but two have homes on the ranch, and they all rally for family dinners and business meetings.

Mollie Stevenson Sr. was a striking woman, almost six feet tall in flat shoes. After her husband's death in 1969, she became the ruler of the Taylor-Stevenson Ranch. In fact, until quite late in her life, Mollie handled much of the business at the ranch. "She still steam rolls oil executives before they can steam roll her," daughter Mollie Jr. once told a reporter. "She can negotiate the socks off a cat," agreed her son, Major Jr. And when she determined it was time for a family meeting, there was not an empty seat in the room. Her wit was quick; her word final.

Although she eventually allowed her children to take over many of her daily chores around the ranch, she still rode out on horseback almost daily with daughter Mollie to point out areas to watch for erosion or spot new wildlife habitats.

Before Texas schools were racially integrated, Stevenson opened the ranch to African-American children to give them a taste of ranch life and open spaces. In 1987, her daughter, Mollie Stevenson Scott, founded the nonprofit American Cowboy Museum on the ranch, honoring the contributions to the nation's culture of women, African-Americans, American Indians and Hispanics. Several years ago, the Professional Tour Guide Association of Houston held one of its meetings at the Taylor-Stevenson Ranch.

In 1988, Mollie Stevenson Sr.'s collection of photographs, documents, posters, and fliers – a lifelong account of her family's story – was diminished by a fire that destroyed the twenty-room ranch house, swallowing up a number of historical treasures, among them her grandmother's original slave papers.

In 2001, two years before her death, Mollie and her daughter, Mollie Stevenson, Jr., were inducted into the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth. They were the first living African-Americans to be so honored.

But the story doesn't end there.

Shortly after Mollie, Sr.'s death, her son, Major W. Stevenson, Sr., and his wife, Beverly, deeded 26 acres of the original family homestead to the Houston Parks Board for a nature preserve. They persisted "through reams of red tape, multiple ownerships, disputed leases, bureaucratic stonewalling, legal wrangling, family tragedies, losses and death," said Ann Hamilton, former parks board executive director. Hamilton met with the Stevensons in 1986 when they first approached the nonprofit organization about a park.

Ellen Red, Horace Taylor's great-granddaughter stood with Major Stevenson and other family members to cut the ribbon ceremonially opening the park. Major Stevenson held his ninth grandchild, eight-month-old December.

The Taylor family credited the late Mollie Taylor Stevenson Sr. with giving them the idea to deed the land. She persuaded 21 family members to allow the city to preserve the site. "My mother passed the historical baton to me, when she passed away earlier this year," said Major Stevenson, a historian and high school teacher. "She entrusted me with the responsibility of protecting and passing on the true undisputed, validated and documented history of her grandparents, E. R. and Ann." The Texas Historical Commission has approved an official subject marker for the park that will tell visitors about its significance in local history.

"Walking down the dirt trail into the dense woods after the ceremony, Stevenson pointed to a massive oak tree with its sprawling, twisted branches and recalled carefree days when he and other children climbed in its limbs and whiled away the time eating summer sausage and cheese."

Today, the land is home to about 77 types of birds, 55 kinds of trees, three ecosystems and a variety of mammals. It has wetlands, prairie and forests with sugarberry, Chinese tallow and pecan trees. The fauna include Attwater's prairie chickens, coyotes, swamp rabbits, bobcats, foxes, yellow-billed coo coos, red-tailed hawks and green-backed herons.

"With the development in the area, there aren't too many places for them to go," said Beverly Stevenson of the animals that roam the park and family lands. Nearly $600,000 in improvements, half of which came from the Houston Endowment, will be made to the park. It will have extensive nature trails, an observation tower, wildlife viewing areas, a pavilion and parking. Phase II of the park development project will include the restoration of Ann Taylor's grave site.

The American Cowboy Museum is located at 11822 Almeda Road. For more information about the museum and the Taylor-Stevenson Ranch, call (713) 433-4441.