Anna Reinke
First Bahá'í in Texas
by Catherine Gent, Austin Texas, 1992
The stupendous news of a new Revelator from God came to Austin probably about 1912 or 1914. Anna Reinke, a young Austinite, visited her sister who was a Bahá'í in Washington, D.C. She accepted it forthwith, becoming, to the best of our knowledge, the first Bahá'í in Texas.
Anna was a seamstress in Austin for many years and bought a city streetcar, probably in the forties, and moved it to her property on a hillside off Highway 71 South, the site of which was then known as Lohmann's Crossing and now is occupied by an Appletree store and shopping center at the south entrance of Lakeway.
It was a beautiful pastoral setting, in a grove of live oak trees overlooking the valley to the west. She called it Flintrock. She was a remarkably resourceful woman who lived-alone, had her own ingenious water system installed, made all her clothes and her shoes (!), grew her own food, added a fine, comfortable patio and covered veranda to her "house" and still found time to correspond with Bahá'ís allover the world. Her teaching charts and loving letters and laboriously hand-written pages of long quotations and prayers from the Writings have been preserved, testimony to her dedication and undying love for Baha'u'llah and His Message.
Anna was eager to share her horne with the Bahá'ís for any Bahá'í activity. Many conferences and picnics and Holy Day observances were held there in the twenty or more years she lived at Flint Rock. It was her fond wish to give her land to the Faith ultimately, to be used for the site of a Bahá'í school, like the one in Bridgeport; however, she grew old and feeble and was obliged to deed the property over to her nephews - Anna never married - in exchange for care in a nursing home. She died in the Monte Siests Nursing Home on DUQmar, near Oak Hill, in 1971.
Anna was born to a German immigrant father, Paul Reinke, and a native Texan mother, Ernaline Lohmann, on August 15, 1882, in Bee Cave, Texas. Her father was a merchant and Anna was one of six children.
In her last few years which were spent in the nursing home, she lived to see one of her attendants accept the Faith. She never ceased to teach!
She suffered a massive stroke and died less then three months before her 89th birthday, on May 24, 1971. She is buried in Maul Cemetery, a family plot of her nephew, W.D. Maul, somewhere near Austin.
When I think of Anna's passing, I remember the line from Wordsworth, " trailing clouds of glory ... " Surely she did.
A happy epilogue to Anna's story
Yvonne Justice tells us that there were three Bahá'ís attending Anna's funeral! True, the nursing home did not notify theBahá'ís of her death as had been requested but Lura Rouse spotted the funeral notice in the morning paper, services to be at ten o'clock in a morturary on South Congress. She quickly called Yvonne at work and those two, plus Don Eakin, a young Bahá'í living in Lura's home, attended.
Don asked permission to read a Bahá'í prayer and did so. Burial was in a family cemetery and the services were private so we do not know where it is. However, it makes us very happy to know that Bahá'ís were there and a prayer was read.
Her old streetcar which had been moved from its site near Lakeway was spotted by a Bahá'í, Michael Zargarov, in 1988, sitting under a shed near a home in the country south of Austin. Snapshots of it are in the archives.