Texas. Observations, historical, geographical and descriptive, In a Series of Letters, Written during a Visit to Austin's Colony, with a view to a permanent settlement in that country, in the Autumn of 1831. By Mrs. Mary Austin Holley. With an appendix, Containing specific answers to certain questions, relative to Colonization in Texas, issued some time since by the London Geographical Society. Also, some notice of the recent political events in that quarter
Baltimore: Armstrong & Plaskitt, 1833. First edition.
Duodecimo in 6s (7 1/8” x 4 5/16”, 181mm x 109mm): binder’s blank, 1-146 [$2 signed (first and third leaves); –11]. 84 leaves, pp. 1-5 (title, imprint, dedication, blank, introduction) 6-167, blank. With an engraved folding map by W. Hooker (second state).
Bound in the publisher’s plum glazed cloth (re-backed, with some of the original back-strip laid down). Title gilt within a cartouche to the front board.
Re-backed, with some of the original back-strip laid down. Sunned at the hinges. Rubbed at the extremities, with wear to the lower front fore-corner. Mild peripheral tanning throughout, and a pale damp-stain to the gutter but an unusually fresh example without foxing.
Mary Austin Holley (1784–1846) was born in New Haven, and so is perhaps unlikely as the author of “the first book in English entirely on Texas” (Streeter). After the death of her father, she was adopted by her mother’s brother Timothy Phelps and his wife Jennett (of Janet; née Broome). The arrival of her cousin, “Father of Texas” Stephen Fuller Austin (1793–1836) as an eleven-year-old also staying with the Phelpses would change the course of her life. She married Horace Holley and moved with him to Lexington, Kentucky for his tenure president of Transylvania University (Austin was a student there, graduating in 1810). She received a land grant on Galveston Bay — the “Old Three Hundred” received land grants from Austin’s Colony — but never resided there.
She traveled the state in 1831 and produced the present work, an epistolary account of the beauty and diversity of Texas. She was a tireless advocate for American annexation, and died seven months after its admission to the Union. Hooker’s map (a second state, with Hooker’s name below the title), one of the most thorough of the territory, along with Holley’s superlatively laudatory prose, make the book one of the greatest siren-calls for emigration to and settlement in Texas.
Graff 1934; Howes H 593; Jenkins, Basic Texas Books 93; Sabin 32528; Streeter, Texas 1135, 1136.
Item #JLR0592
Price: $30,000