DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm just the voice carryin' it down the road. Now, most folks who know the name Burnet in Texas history know it as belonging to David G. Burnet — the man who served as president ad interim of the Republic of Texas, from March the sixteenth all the way through October the twenty-second of 1836.
That's a stretch of time that would test any person's constitution, given what Texas was going through in those months. But here's what the marker wants you to know, and I think it's worth slowin' down for: behind that president stood a woman who'd come a long, long way to be there. Hannah Este Burnet was born in Morriston, New Jersey, on December the eighth, eighteen hundred.
She became the wife of David G. Burnet, and by extension, she became part of one of the most consequential and turbulent chapters this young republic ever lived through. She was there.
Through all of it. And then, in 1858, she was gone. The marker doesn't dress it up with ceremony.
It just gives you the dates and lets you do the reckonin'. A woman born in New Jersey in eighteen hundred, who ended up woven into the founding fabric of Texas — and whose name, if we're bein' honest, doesn't get nearly the road time that her husband's does. Well.
Now you know it.
What the marker says
Born in Morriston, N. J., December 8, 1800; died in 1858. Wife of David G. Burnet, president ad interim of Texas, March 16 to Oct. 22, 1836.