Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, and spring is just weeks away. To celebrate the rites of spring and the flower power of love, the Texas Collection at Baylor University this week unveiled the timely historical exhibit “Texas Blooms.”

The Texas Tickseed or Coreopsis linifolia is an herb of the family Asteraceae. Some 28 of the 35 species cultivated are native to North America. The petals are usually yellow with a toothed tip.
Terri Jo Ryan/Waco Tribune-Herald

The Carroll Library on campus, home of the collection, is open today and Feb. 27 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Visitors can take in the display of botanical specimens gathered on the eve of the U.S. Civil War by a 19th century Waco resident, Florence Speight. The display continues through the spring.

Speight was the daughter of Joseph Warren Speight (1825-88), a North Carolina lawyer who came to Waco in 1854 to practice farming and surveying. The avid civic leader had a total of five children with two wives.

As a colonel for the Confederacy, he formed the 15th Regiment from McLennan County and commanded it from April 1862-64, when he had to resign because of ill health.

Florence Speight, daughter of Col. J.W. Speight of Waco fame, collected botanical samples in February 1861 as a girl. Some of her specimens are on display this month and next at the Carroll Library.
Terri Jo Ryan/Waco Tribune-Herald

After he recovered, he became president of Waco University from 1864-65 and then a cotton dealer. After the U.S. Civil War, he was one of the community figures who led the Suspension Bridge project, which opened in 1870.

The Waco Bridge Company was granted a charter by the state legislature Nov. 1, 1866, stipulating that no other bridge could be erected on the Brazos within five miles of Waco for 25 years.

Speight went on to buy and consolidate two of Waco’s newspapers in the 1880s before his death in 1888. He is buried in Oakwood Cemetery.

Ellen Brown, archivist with The Texas Collection, said the pressed and dried flowers in the Texas Blooms display came from a faded, red-velvet scrapbook kept by Florence, who was born about 1850.

Staff at The Texas Collection at Baylor University have found many examples of colorful local flora from the botanical books in the collection to illustrate the theme “Texas Blooms.”
Terri Jo Ryan/Waco Tribune-Herald

Florence’s 100-specimen herbarium, a collection of preserved plant specimens, is a window into another time, a period of genteel hobbies and amateur scientific pursuits, Brown said.

“We don’t know if this (collection) was a school assignment or a personal hobby, but it offers a fascinating glimpse into the flora of Central Texas,” she said.

Florence Speight and lawyer Ernest A. McKenney, a Canadian-born insurance representative and land speculator who had enlisted in Company C of the Sixth Texas Calvary during the war, were married in Waco on Jan. 5, 1868. They had three children, at least two of whom did not reach adulthood. Speight died Dec. 26, 1922, and is buried in Oakwood Cemetery.

tjryan@wacotrib.com

757-5746

Additional sources: Foreigners in the Confederacy, by Ella Lonn (1940); Handbook of Texas Online, Records of Fall and Puckett Funeral Home; The Texas Collection at Baylor University.