Elisabet Ney - Personal Life

Personal Life

While visiting friends in Heidelberg in 1853, Ney made the acquaintance of a young Scottish medical student named Edmund Montgomery. It would be a meeting of minds and idealist rebellious spirits. They kept in touch, although she viewed the institution of marriage as a state of bondage for women. He would not be deterred, and after he established a medical practice in Madeira, they were married at the British consulate on November 7, 1863.

Ney, however, remained outspoken about women's roles. She refused to use her husband's name, often denied she was even married, and once remarked:

She wore pants and rode her horses astride as men did. She liked to fashion her own clothes, which, in addition to the slacks, included boots and a black artist frock coat.

Montgomery was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1863. By 1870, the Franco-Prussian War had begun. In autumn of that year, Ney became pregnant with their first child. Montgomery received a letter from his friend Baron Carl Vicco Otto Friedrich Constantin von Stralendorff of Mecklenburg-Schwerin who had moved to Thomasville, Georgia with his new wife Margaret Elizabeth Russell of Boston, Massachusetts, declaring the location "Earth's paradise." On January 14, 1871, Ney and Montgomery, accompanied by their housekeeper Cenci, emigrated to Georgia, to a colony promoted as a resort for consumptives. Son Arthur (1871–1873) was born in Georgia, and son Lorne (1872–1913) was born in Red Wing, Minnesota during one of their travels. Baron and Baroness von Stralendorff returned to Wismar Germany where he died on July 1, 1872.

In 1873, Ney traveled alone to Texas. With the help of German Consul Julius Runge in Galveston, she was shown Liendo Plantation near Hempstead in Waller County, Texas. On March 4, 1873, Montgomery and the rest of the family arrived, and he purchased it. While he tended to his research, she ran it for the next twenty years. Oldest son Arthur died of diphtheria in 1873.