Liendo Plantation: Civil War Ghosts & Elisabet Ney

Just east of Hempstead stands Liendo, one of the oldest cotton plantations in Texas — a white-columned house built in 1853 on land first granted in a Mexican-era title. Its story runs from the antebellum South through the Civil War, when the grounds nearby held a Confederate prison camp, and on into a stranger chapter: in 1873 the house was bought by Dr. Edmund Montgomery, a Scottish-trained philosopher, and his wife Elisabet Ney, a European-trained sculptor who would carve the statues of Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston that stand in the Texas Capitol. She is said to have stepped onto the balcony, thrown out her arms, and declared this the place where she would live and die — and she did. This short driving tour circles Liendo, the vanished prison camp, the Groce family lands that made it all possible, and the Waller County seat in Hempstead. The plantation has its ghost stories; those are offered as local lore. The history is remarkable enough on its own.