Elsie Reece

Elsie Reece was born around 1847 on John Mueldrew's small plantation near Navasota in Grimes County, Texas, where about twenty enslaved people, most of them related, lived and worked. She was the youngest of seven children. Her father died when she was a year old. She was taught to weave and sew; her brother was the shoemaker, her mother tended the cows, and her uncle John was the carpenter.

She remembered Saturday-night dances with fiddles and quadrilles, Sunday preaching by a man named Buffington, and Christmas, when someone dressed as Santa Claus handed out candy and shoes and no work was required for a week. At about fourteen she helped sew uniforms for the enslaver's sons, Jim and Sam, who joined the Confederate army; Sam lost a leg and died after coming home. When Jim read the emancipation order, she said, the freed people were stunned and worried all night about where they would live, until they learned they could stay for wages.

Her family stayed nearly two years, then moved to Navasota and hired out as cooks. At eighteen she married John Love, a carpenter who built them a house. He died suddenly in 1881, leaving her to support their four children by cooking. She made sure they went to school. Eight years later she married Dave Reece, a Baptist preacher, and had two more children. In 1926 she moved to Fort Worth to live with her daughter, the only one of her children still living, on a seven-dollar monthly pension.