After the 1894 tour of U.S. cities, Texas’s Governor
James Stephen Hogg and his daughter Ima were nationally known, and so was Ima’s
name. Throughout the 1890s newspapers around the nation printed stories printed
stories about Governor Hogg of Texas, who had daughters named Ima, Ura, and
Shesa, and sons variously named Hesa, Harry, or Moore. The Galveston Daily News quoted New York papers about “Eura” and
“Moore” Hogg. The New Oxford Item in
Oxford, Pennsylvania, and the Richwood
Gazette in Richwood, Ohio, remarked on Ima and her oddly-named siblings.
When the editor of a Chicago paper wrote to Hogg
asking about his children’s names, Ima’s father replied:
“I beg to advise you
that the names of my children are William, Ima, Mike and Tom—three boys and one
girl—whose ages are, respectively, 21, 14, 11, and 9 years. . . . The names of
Ura, Hesa, Shesa, Harry, and Moore Hogg are the mythical creatures of
campaigners who failed to beat me for office.”
That was not the last word: As an item in the Fayetteville [North Carolina] Observer noted a few days later:
“Ex-Governor Hogg of Texas takes the trouble to
write to a Chicago paper that he has no children named Ura, Hesa, and Sheesa,
but admits that he has a daughter named Ima. This seems to give his whole case
away. . . .”
But the name stories would not go away. A few years
later, ex-Governor Hogg told a journalist who asked about his daughter’s
name: “The truth of the matter is, that she was named by her mother. Her
mother was reading a book somewhere in which one of the characters which
interested her exceptionally was named Ima. About that time the little girl
came along, and she was named Ima. We never noticed the play of her name until
it was called to our attention.”
But
Ima had another version of her naming: she said that her father named her to
honor the memory of his late brother, Thomas Elisha Hogg. author of “The Fate of Marvin,” a poem about the
Civil War. In it there was a heroine named Ima.
Hmmmm.
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