Born of a distinguished family on both sides of her heritage, Laura Baker Hutcheson was born on a plantation in Grimes County, Texas, in 1857 and died in downtown Houston, Texas, in 1924. During her lifetime she traveled the whole course of the tumultuous national experience beginning before the Civil War and ending after World War I. Her life paralleled the recovery and growth of the South, the state of Texas, and city of Houston as well. She road the wave of the early progressive movement for females wearing a full complement of hats during her sixty-six years. She was highly educated in Virginia and abroad as a girl, married a prominent Houston man, bore four children, was divorced at forty, and then went to work carving out a very successful and visible professional life for the next twenty-five years as a music critic, writer, educator and musician. Truly, she was a Renaissance woman! Her early life was marked by a tragedy. Her father, Capt. J. William Hutcheson, was fatally wounded while leading a charge as Captain of Company G., 4th Texas Inf. Reg. Hood's Brigade at Gaines Mill, one of the Seven Day's Battles before Richmond in June 1862. She had been named Laura, for her mother, but in memory of her father her name was changed to Willie while she was still a very small child. She loved the name and revered her father's memory, and sought to emulate him in the scholarly attainments for which he was admired. "Even yet he is spoken of by his contemporaries as the most brilliant lawyer at the Texas bar during his brief but noteworthy career." When her mother remarried Dr. Greensville S. Dowell and moved to Galveston, Willie's guardianship was awarded to her uncle, Jos. Hutcheson, and she moved to Virginia in 1868 to live with her paternal Hutcheson grandparents so as to be educated nearby. Willie attended school at Staunton, Virginia at the Wesleyan Female Institute from which she graduated in 1875 with the highest honors. This is the first evidence of the breath and depth of Willie's exceptional mind which was to serve her in such good stead in her later life as a pioneering newspaperwoman. "Honor to whom Honor is due. Your correspondent at Staunton, Va. was given a list of the Texas young ladies who were distinguished on the occasion of the last annual commencement of the Wesleyan Female Institute fails to mention the names of the only four young ladies from Texas who received diplomas as full graduates: on that occasion, to wit: "Miss L. W. Hutcheson of Galveston, Texas, who graduated in the following schools: vocal music, moral philosophy, Greek natural philosophy, French, German, chemistry, history, English literature. She took a gold medal for distinction in German, and was selected to deliver the salutatory essay of the graduating class." And then, according to her obituary, she continued her education traveling abroad and graduating from the Sorbonne, Paris in 1876. Surely this was an unusual thing for a young woman of her era. In 1876, Willie moved back to Houston, Texas to live with her uncle and aunt Joseph Chappell and Mildred C. Hutcheson and their growing family of six children.-------------------------Willie married Robert E. C. Wilson on June 25,1879, had four children and was later divorced. At her divorce she took back her maiden name and changed the name of her only surviving child, James, to James Hutcheson. Hutcheson Family Bible (Collection of Joanne S. Wilson); Sterling Hutcheson Hutcheson Family Antecedents and Descendants, (San Diego, California: Sterling Hutcheson,1999).