Mary Maverick - Early Life

Early Life

Mary Ann Adams was born in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama to William Lewis Adams, a lawyer, and Agatha Strother (Lewis) Adams. Her maternal grandmother was a cousin of James Madison, while her father's family had founded Lynchburg, Virginia. Her parents lived along the James River in Virginia, where her father exported flour and tobacco. During the War of 1812 her father left for Alabama and bought a plantation near Tuscaloosa. While purchasing supplies in Mobile, Robert Adams answered Andrew Jackson's call for volunteers to help defend New Orleans and raised a company which he led in the Battle of New Orleans. In 1816, her mother came to live permanently in Alabama as well.

In Alabama, Robert Adams practiced law, and in 1827 he served as an agent of U.S. Treasury Department. He died in June 1827, leaving his widow to raise their six surviving children, all under the age of 12. Maverick attended boarding school in Tuscaloosa to meet her father's wish that his children be appropriately educated.

On August 4, 1836, she married Samuel Augustus Maverick, a Yale graduate who had been the Alamo garrison's delegate to the Convention of 1836 which had declared Texas' independence from Mexico. Samuel Maverick sold his Alabama plantation at the beginning of 1837, and Maverick accompanied her husband to New Orleans so that he could conduct business and be closer to news of Texas. While she was in New Orleans, her brother William left for Texas. In March 1837, she and her husband visited his father in South Carolina, where they refused the elder Maverick's gift of his plantation. On May 14, 1837, she gave birth to her first child, Samuel Maverick, Jr. in South Carolina.