What I’m reading now is from a book that is titled The First Ladies of Texas. Each chapter is about one of the first ladies of Texas. The chapter I am the most interested in is the one titled The Sad, Beautiful Face of Poor Miss Susie. There has to be more to this story. The story I’m about to write. I have found and will add a link to where both Pendleton Mira and Susie Taylor are buried. I can’t find where her parents are buried though. They came from a very prominent family in Marshall, Texas. I didn’t find a old plantation home or an old stately home in Marshall, Texas with the name Taylor.
The Sad, Beautiful Face of Poor Miss Susie
The life of Sue Ellen Taylor Mira. Can only be told as a short, tragic mystery, full of unanswered questions. Why did she and her husband spend their wedding night apart? Why did Pendleton Mira treat his gay, Beautiful wife so coldly? Was there another woman or woman in his life? What happened to Susie Mura in the few blank years she lived after her husband left her and rode off to Mexico to die?
At the time of her wedding, Susie Taylor was 15 1/2 years old and the adored daughter of a large family.
She was petite, vivacious. She had a large wedding at her family’s home in the country near Marshall, Texas, with music, dancing, delicious foods, wines and laughter. Instead of settling into a happy, companionable marriage. Susie’s experience was only coldness and estrangement from her husband, with one brief exception.
Probably any guest at the wedding of Susie Taylor and Pendleton Murrah in 1850 would have prophesied a happy future for the couple. Both were well known and well liked in their hometown of Marshall, even though there was a mystery connected with Mira’s background. It was known that he had been educated by the Baptist Church at Brown University in Rhode Island, but that was all. Actually, he had been born out of wedlock in a cabin on the old Choctaw Trail in what is now Chilton County, Alabama.
His mother was a Murrah, her father was a Bishop in the Methodist Church.
She later married a man named Harper and was a respected member of her community, But Mira was always deeply ashamed of his mother. He shunned her publicly, however, he visited her secretly and gave her money at intervals. There were rumors of his illegitimacy in Marshall, but he had proved himself in the eyes of his fellow Texans as a hard working, dynamic attorney and politician, so the townspeople were happy to see him marry the popular Susie Taylor.
What happened on their wedding night reminds remains a puzzle. After the guests had left, the young bride waited in her bedroom for the groom to come up to her, and the groom sat in the parlor waiting for his bride to come down to him. No one seems to have told him where she was. Evidently some kind of misunderstanding had taken place. It seems incredible that such a fiasco could continue all night, even if shyness on her part and pride on his part were the cause. But it did.
The next morning, stern and unforgiving, Pendleton Murrah took his bride away from her family home.
During the next 13 years, while they lived in Marshall, Mira built up a thriving law practice, made money, and dabbled in politics. There is strong evidence that he also had stopped for a time some extramarital activity, including an aborted plan to elope to Mexico with the young sister of his wife. Weather Susie knew anything about the scheme is questionable. In 1855, Pendleton was Defeated. To in a campaign for a seat in Congress, but in 1857 he was elected to the legislature. Susie stayed at home, managed their household, took care of an orphaned child, and kept her loneliness to herself. Sometime during those hard working years, Pendleton contracted tuberculosis. After the Civil War began, he tried to work as a quartermaster in East Texas, but had to quit because of his health. When he was elected governor to succeed Lubbock in 1863, he was already a dying man. Susie was 28 when she became mistress of the mansion, and whatever unhappiness she felt inside, to the public, she appeared as bright and charming during the bleak war years.
The mansions most persistent ghost story grew out of a family tragedy that happened while the Murrah were living there. During a time when a beautiful young niece of the governors was a guest, a nephew of Pendleton’s came to visit. He fell madly in love with his cousin, and apparently she led him to believe that she cared about him too. But when he proposed, she laughed at him. It was more than the impetuous young lover could bear. That night, from the little N room of the mansion, a shot was heard. The horrified family rushed in to find the dead youth’s body sprawled across the bed and the wall splattered with blood. Some months later, after the Couple left the mansion. A Fontaine, their daughter, 16 year old Melissa Fontaine, and a friend decided they wanted to sleep in the Governor’s house. In the middle of the night the girls heard strange moans and groans, then they felt the hair arise on the back of their neck. And they fled back to their own quarters. Over the years, many other people staying at the mansion have heard strange noises and seen strange sights, such as doorknobs that turn on their own.
As the war ended, wild rumors began to fly that rebel leaders would be taken prisoner and severely punished. Many Confederate officials crossed over to Mexico seeking refuge. Pendleton decided to go with them. His tuberculosis had become very bad during the 16 strenuous months of his administration. He must have been aware that he was near the end of his life when he put on his old Gray uniform and rode away from the shattered capital and from the woman he had married. Less than two months later, he died in Monterey and was buried there in an unmarked grave.
What happened to Susie after Pendleton’s departure can only be guessed from a few known facts. One of which is she left the mansion and the servants were in charge and she went back to Marshall TX. We know she died in 1868 in Tyler, Texas and is buried there. She was thirty three years old.
