The Private Thoughts of a Traveling Preacher’s Wife: The Journals of Malvinia Louisa Foster, Central Texas, 1847-1870

Louisa Foster came to Texas as a child with the Old Three Hundred, the first settlers brought to Texas by Stephen F. Austin. She married a young traveling preacher from Tennessee, the Rev. Finis Foster. Unlike many women at this time, Louisa was educated and well read. During this period, discussions and critical views of religion were the domains of the men. Louisa, however, voiced her views freely and believed that women should be allowed to do so. Having turned to religion for consolation following multiple deaths in her family, Louisa organized and led her own weekly prayer group and was one of the few women to actively try to convert both men and women to her church.

She kept a diary, and in these eleven journals from 1847 to 1870, Louisa recounts the difficult weather conditions, the Civil War, religion, conflicting views on slavery, the prices of goods, disease and medicine, and raising a family on the frontier in Central Texas.

Louisa’s youngest son, John Collier Foster, also kept a diary, from 1882 to 1883, with vivid descriptions of his social life in town and his impressions of seeing the first electric light and the first telephone. These firsthand accounts give unique insight into life in Texas in the mid-nineteenth century.