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A lonely life in the newly completed Governor's Mansion was described in a letter Elisha Marshall Pease wrote to his wife, Lucadia, back home in Connecticut in 1856.  Excerpts from this letter and others contained in the Pease Collection of the Austin History Center were read by Mike Miller, Archivist, Austin History Center, and Kay Hart, board member of the Austin History Center Association, during their presentation to the Discussion Interest Group on February 25, 2009 at the Yarborough Library.

The series of letters details the courtship and marriage of Elisha and Lucadia Niles Pease, life in frontier Brazoria, Texas, the years as governor and early days at Woodlawn, the 365 acre estate they bought in west Austin in 1857.

As Kay Hart related, her mother-in-law, Katherine Hart, who was the first curator of the Austin-Travis County Collection, now the Austin History Center, persuaded Tom Graham, great-grandson of Elisha, to donate the family papers to the Austin Public Library in 1960. These letters, with their rich detail describing the difficulties of childbirth, raising children and running a home in pioneer Texas while her politician husband was away from home most of the time, added immeasurable depth to the collection.

Then, Katherine Hart tells the story that the first day she went to the Pease home to collect the papers, she walked up the alley toward the barn-like building behind the house, where the family kept all of their memorabilia. She noticed that pieces of paper were blowing all around the alley, and she bent over to pick up one of them that was caught in the fence. It was a letter dated 1845, the year Texas became a state. "I was so excited I could hardly stand it," she says. The barn was stuffed with boxes overflowing with primary sources: letters, documents, photographs, and books. It took her and an assistant 10 years to catalogue the papers, which quadrupled the Austin-Travis County Collection, and two books resulted: "Pease Porridge Hot," and "Lucadia Pease and the Governor: letters, 1850-1857." Both are on sale at Book People and the History Center.

Another cache of papers has recently come to light with a charming story about the Graham's oversight of the collection.  It seems that in 1941, in the days of private trash collectors before city-funded garbage collection began, a young boy of eight made a habit of rifling through people's refuse and spotted a big red trunk.  Intrigued, he paid the trash man 25 cents for it, and brought it home to find it full of papers from the Pease family. Even at that young age he recognized the importance of his find and hung on to it.  Eventually it passed to his son, who catalogued and organized it and offered to sell it to the Library.  Last December the Austin History Center Association was able to buy 25% of these important papers for $52,000 and hopes to be able to raise enough money to buy the rest. 

Hart passed out information about the importance of the remaining Pease Papers and information about how to donate to the fund.  For more information, contact the Austin History Center Association, 974-7499.

The Enfield neighborhood was carved out of the Pease estate of Woodlawn, and roads are named after the Pease family or for towns in Connecticut. The descendants of Elisha and Lucadia lived at Woodlawn, 6 Niles Road, until 1957 when they sold it to outgoing governor Allan Shivers.  The Shivers family donated it to the University of Texas who then sold it to the State. It was Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock's dream to make it into a new governor's mansion or state conference center.  When Bullock died, that dream died too and the State sold it to an individual who has now restored it to its former glory.

Elisha Pease came to Texas in 1835, fought at Gonzalez, one of the first battles of the Texas Revolution, later was a delegate to the convention at Washington-on-the-Brazos that declared independence from Mexico, and he helped write the Constitution for the Republic.  He held various offices in the government of the Republic and later was governor of the state from 1853-57 and again from 1867-69.

An outstanding governor, he helped start the School for the Blind, the School for the Deaf, and the Austin State Hospital. He persuaded the legislature to establish the forerunner of what is now the Permanent School Fund.  He also supervised the building campaign that led to the completion of the Governor's Mansion, the General Land Office building and a new Capital.  Pease died in 1883 and is buried in Oakwood Cemetery.