Alice Houston

Alice Houston was born in October 1859, enslaved by Judge Jim Watkins on his small plantation in Hays County, near San Marcos, Texas. Her mother was Mariah Watkins and her father Henry Watkins, who caught possums in the woods on Saturday nights and baked them with sweet potatoes. As a child she was trained by her mistress as a house girl and nursemaid, and she said that is where she learned the skills that made her career.

She recalled log cabins chinked with mud, clothes woven at home and dyed with copperas and sumac berries, camp meetings, and lead pendants worn against malaria. She said the Watkins family taught the children to read, and after the war she went to a real school, which is why she could read the doctor books she later used. When the war ended, the enslaved families were offered half of what they raised, and they stayed for several years.

After her mistress died, she and her husband, Jim Houston, moved to San Angelo, Texas. There she worked for decades as a nurse and midwife, and when interviewed she was still caring for families and "telling folks how to take care of the children."