Hungarian Heritage Review, 1990 (19. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1990-01-01 / 1. szám
Helen Madarasz rose to prominence in San Antonio. She overcame social prejudices against single, independent businesswomen during the late Victorian age. Her noble origins as well as her tenacity (and because of her respected father’s position as U.S. Consul at Ancona, Italy under President Abraham Lincoln and leading Bexar County Republican during Reconstruction) propelled her into high social circles, including that of the George Brackenridge family. Her older son, Ladislaus, worked in Brackenridge’s San Antonio National Bank and was known as one of the city’s most prominent young “society men”. Helen rode in San Antonio’s first Battle of Flowers Parade in a flower-bedecked carriage, attended the Chicago’s World Fair, and visited her relatives in Hungary during the 1890s. Helen Madarasz’s life was devoted to her sons. Her decision to remain in Texas when her relatives departed for their homeland in the 1870s was made solely for their benefit; they were American-born and faced a brighter future in the United States. As small children, Ladislaus and Louis accompanied her to the fields, often getting sunburned. Borrowing tuition from relatives, she sent them to a superior boarding school, St. Mary’s College, in San Antonio, disdaining the local country public school filled with “horrible German children”. Both sons attended northern universities and entered the business world in San Antonio. Louis became nationally famous as a calligrapher in New York, and Ladislaus founded Ilka Nursery in San Antonio. Both married, the latter gave Helen two grandchildren. The beginning and end of Helen Madarasz’s life in Texas were starkly tragic. Her son Bela died when she arrived. Four decades later, she was raped, bludgeoned to death and incinerated by burglars in her home on the last day of April, 1899. Her funeral services were held in San Antonio’s Madison Square Presbyterian Church, but no stone marked her grave in the City Cemetery. Her life as a single parent, farmer and businesswoman, certainly the first for a Hungarian woman in Texas, proved a colorful episode in the history of Texas’ immigrant community of the last century. (Editor’s Note: Sources on the life of Helen Ujhazy Madarasz can be found in Peter Bogati’s book Edes Polim! [My Dear Poli!] (Budapest, 1979) which contains her transcribed letters and the diary of her sister, Klara Ujhazy Kellerschon, now in the Hungarian National Archives, Budapest, Hungary. Translations were made by Dr. John J. Alpar, Amarillo, Texas. This and the stories of pioneer Hungarians in Texas will form part of the Institute of Texan Cultures’ forthcoming history, The Hungarian Texans, to be published in 1990). 18 HUNGARIAN HERITAGE REVIEW JANUARY 1990
