The Houston-Lea Tomb

Margaret Moffette Lea married Sam Houston in 1840, when she was twenty one and he was forty seven, bore him eight children, and is generally credited with persuading him both to stop drinking and to be baptised. She outlived him by four years. He died at Huntsville in 1863 and was buried there. She died at Independence on 3 December 1867, aged forty eight, of yellow fever, in the epidemic that killed roughly four thousand Texans that year, and she was not buried beside him. The state marker at the cemetery says why: the danger of contagion made it impossible to carry her to Huntsville for burial beside her husband. The understanding behind that was wrong. The disease is carried by mosquitoes, which was not established until Walter Reed's commission proved it in 1900, thirty three years too late to be of any use to the Houston family. So Margaret was buried at Independence next to her mother Nancy Moffette Lea, in a tomb Nancy had built to hold the two of them. The result is that the two Houstons lie about fifty five miles apart for a reason that turned out not to be a reason. Sam Houston is at Oakwood Cemetery in Huntsville under a state monument, in the middle of a town that has built a good deal of its identity on him. Margaret is in a family plot of five graves at a country crossroads at Independence, across the road from the Baptist church she and her husband joined.