Flower of the Wilderness, Mother Neff and the State Parks of Texas

When the state of Texas was only nine years old, newlywed Isabella Neff and her husband, Noah, traveled a thousand miles in a light wagon from safe, settled Virginia to set up housekeeping on the Texas frontier. Nothing about the trip or their new home in Coryell County would be easy.


Isabella and Noah raised nine children in their log cabin on the Texas prairie including a son who became governor of Texas and then president of Baylor University.


Isabella's gift to the public of six idyllic acres along the Leon River would prompt her son, Governor Pat Neff, to create a state parks board and to designate his mother’s six acres along with a portion of his own land as the first state park of Texas.