Bride Neill Taylor
Born to Judge James and Julia Walsh Neill in Peoria, Illinois, Bride Neill Taylor (1858-1937) moved to Austin in 1871 with her family, where she received a private education. She graduated from Nazareth Academy in Kentucky (currently Spalding University) in 1876. She married Thomas Frederick Taylor, a civil servant transferred from Washington D.C. to Austin, in April of 1880. The couple moved to Washington D.C. shortly after marriage, and Taylor worked as a journalist for Washington’s Sun Capitol. She became Washington correspondent for the Austin Statesman in 1881 following the assassination of President Garfield and returned to Texas when her mother became ill in 1883. She enrolled in the University of Texas at Austin that same year to become a teacher and proceeded to teach in Austin’s public schools for four years. She also continued to pursue a career in journalism until her death in 1937, writing about women’s issues, as well as literary, historical, and educational topics for newspapers such as the Galveston Daily News. Taylor also wrote a number of short stories, one of which was published in Lippincott's Notable Stories in 1893. That same year, Taylor founded the American History Club in her Austin home, an organization that met biweekly for the purpose of studying American history and literature. Taylor was also one of three women present at the founding of the Texas State Historical Association in 1897 and ended up serving on its executive council in 1926.
Taylor became good friends with Elisabet Ney in the early 1890s following Ney’s arrival in Austin, and in 1895 Ney wrote an emotional letter to Taylor expressing her dissatisfaction with the period following the presentation of her work for the Chicago World’s Fair. In 1897, Ney told Taylor a number of stories about her life that formed the basis for Taylor’s Elisabet Ney, Sculptor, first appearing as an article Taylor wrote that year for Texas Magazine. Several years after Ney’s death in 1907, her friends and supporters called upon Taylor to expand her previous work into a full-length biography, accomplished through word-of-mouth testimony from twenty-eight witnesses. In 1911, Taylor continued to honor Elisabet Ney’s legacy by helping establish the Texas Fine Arts Association in 1911, an organization that had started informally at Ney’s studio, Formosa, with the goal of promoting the arts in Texas. She would go on to type an address for the 1933 Ney Centennial dedication of the Ella Dancy Dibrell Memorial Tablet, visible today at the Elisabet Ney Museum.
Elisabet Ney, Sculptor hosted by The Portal to Texas History. Crediting Star of the Republic Museum.