Another Year Finds Me In Texas: The Civil War Diary of Lucy Pier Stevens ed. by Vicky Adams Tongate (review)

Lucy Pier Stevens’s Civil War diary covers the period from January 1863 through May 1865. Lucy, a native and resident of Milan, Ohio, had arrived in Texas on December 25, 1859, at the age of twenty-one. She came to visit the family of her maternal aunt, Lu Merry Pier, who had moved to Texas in 1835 with her husband, James Bradford Pier. Still in Texas in 1861, Lucy found that the advent of war and blockade of the Texas coast left her with no safe means of travel back to Ohio and no way to communicate with her family there. At home in Ohio, Lucy was the fifth of six siblings, and in Texas she lived in a similarly sized family with her aunt, uncle, and three cousins (two of whom were younger than Lucy). Her uncle, a veteran of the Texas Revolution, lived in the vicinity of Travis, a town in present-day Austin County, where he settled in 1835. By 1860, when Lucy had joined his household, he owned eleven slaves, and he increased his holding to fourteen before emancipation, placing him in the small planter class.

Lucy had been living in Travis long enough before secession and the war to have found a place in the family and in the community. The diary she began in 1863 demonstrates the degree to which she had formed bonds with her extended family, her neighbors, and the wider community. She records the daily social practice of visiting, occurrences of church meetings, her time teaching children, births, deaths, the weather, and news of local men who were serving in the army. Her journal is remarkable in that it makes plain how distant the war was from most of Texas, and the degree to which everyday life continued in Austin County. It also demonstrates how war reports came to the area, as well as how often those reports were initially wrong.

The volume is well edited, with useful reference materials such as dramatis personae in the front matter as well as informative footnoting throughout. Vicky Adams Tongate’s introduction provides a helpful starting point for getting to know Lucy and her family, as well as the rural community in which they lived. This is further aided by Tongate’s familiarity with the diaries of Lucy’s Aunt Lu and Cousin Sarah, which cover similar periods to some of Lucy’s diaries. Tongate’s work provides a valuable look at the daily lives of women, of a Texas community, and of the Civil War home front.