Meet Anna Martin, a Texas banking pioneer

The ABA Banking Journal Podcast — sponsored by Intrafi — wraps up Women’s History Month with a conversation on an early Texas banking pioneer: Anna Mebus Martin (1843–1925). Museum curator Diana Vela tells the story of Martin, a German immigrant who arrived in the Lone Star State at age 14 and settled in rural west-central Texas. At the age of 35, Martin was widowed and began a long and successful career as a postmaster, storekeeper, rancher, barbed-wire entrepreneur and, ultimately, a community bank founder and president. As Martin once put it in a surviving letter, “I heard men say, ‘She is only a woman,’ but I showed them what a woman could do.”