The Sam Houston Memorial Museum and Republic of Texas Presidential Library has an exhibit “Ladies of Influence: Significant Women in the Life of Sam Houston” open now until April 16 in the north gallery.
The exhibit highlights the important women in Sam Houston’s life. Ten women were focused on in the exhibit ranging from wives of Sam Houston to his daughters over the years. While there were other women involved in Sam Houston’s life, not all were included in the exhibit.
“Doing research of the other women in Texas history I was going to include them too but It was just too many people,” Curator of Exhibits Jude Routh said. “I decided to go ahead and narrow it down to people (Sam Houston) actually had relationships with. That’s what determined who was on this graphic.”
The exhibit consists of a large graphic that has photos of eight women that had relationships with Sam Houston. Some of the women have photos of their gravestones instead since there are no known pictures of them. Each woman also has a paragraph of text to provide more information about them and their relationship with Sam Houston.
The exhibit took around three months for Routh to put the exhibit together. After the exhibit leaves on April 16 it will not be gone for good. Routh has plans to rotate the exhibit from time to time, especially around Women’s History Month.
The entire graphic for the exhibit was done by hand, including the name above. Rather than make it a poster, Routh used an X-ACTO knife to cut out the name of the exhibit out of foam by hand.
While the exhibit contains no artifacts, that does not make it any less important.
“There are women in history and so many are just men in the history books,” Routh said. “We’re including the women in history and telling a little bit more about them.”
The museum is open Tuesday – Saturday from 9:00 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. and on Sunday from 12:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.Students at SHSU are able to enter for free, and adults have to pay $5.
