Public domain image | This ambrosetype was made not long before Adah Isaacs Menken passed through Liberty. Then going by the name Ada Theodore, she appears here at age 19. She went by many names and deliberately obscured information about her parents, for good reason. The most famous and most highly paid actress of her time, she achieved fame passing as white. She was born to a free black man in Louisiana named Auguste Theodore and a mixed-race Creole mother named Marie. This is information that very likely would have shocked to the editor of The Liberty Gazette in 1855 when he published several of her literary works.

Courtesy Sam Houston Regional Library | This advertisement appeared in the Oct. 8, 1855 edition of the first Liberty Gazette. Note the horse race ad that follows it.

Courtesy Sam Houston Regional Library | The poem, “I Am Thine—To W.H.K.,” was published in The Liberty Gazette, Nov. 5, 1855.