The little town of Leander, Texas, was only 26 years old when Anna Ray (Craven) Borho was born, and she has personally witnessed more than three-quarters of the now-booming city’s history. She was there when the first car arrived; she saw the first airplane in Leander – it landed in a field behind her home – and she remembers well when the electricity first was turned on in 1939. And since age 15, she has been a mainstay of the historic Leander Presbyterian Church, playing the piano almost every Sunday for more than eighty-five years!

Our story starts before Anna Ray or Leander were even thought of. It was all the way back in 1854 when an English couple named George and Jane Craven arrived in Texas and settled in “Bagdad Prairie,” on the western side of Williamson County. George was a wheelwright and wagon-builder; Jane became the very first pianist at the “Pleasant Hill Presbyterian Church.”

By 1880, Bagdad was a stage stop on the route between Austin and Lampasas, and the thriving community boasted a hotel, a school, several general stores, two blacksmith shops and several churches. But Bagdad was doomed by the caution of its business leaders; when the Austin & Northwestern Railroad began to build a track to Burnet in 1882, the little town opposed the idea, and the railroad went a mile to the east.

It didn’t take long for Bagdad residents to realize their mistake. They began moving their homes and businesses closer to the tracks, where the railroad company sold lots in a new town named for Leander “Catfish” Brown. The congregation from Pleasant Hill formed Leander Presbyterian in 1883.

Ranching, farming and cedar posts were the main industries in the young town, and Wesley Craven (son of George and Jane) built a cotton gin. By 1890, Leander’s population had grown to 329, and there was a thriving business district by the railroad tracks. Wesley Craven’s children carried on the family’s musical tradition. Henry Roscoe Craven (a mail carrier) played the banjo, violin, bass horn and mandolin; he and his brother, Theodore (who played the trombone) played with a group from Liberty Hill. His sister, Ethel, was the pianist at Leander Presbyterian and taught local children to play the piano.

Anna Ray, Henry Craven’s oldest daughter, was born in July of 1908, in a small frame house on the west side of the tracks in Leander. She doesn’t remember that home; her parents moved to the other side of the tracks shortly after her birth. She started school at age seven, around the time that the first car arrived in Leander. She was not terribly impressed; “It looked unremarkably like a buggy,” she recalls. Her own family relied on a horse-and-buggy for transportation; she remembers day-trips to visit relatives in Georgetown, when darkness fell before they reached home. “We didn’t have any lights, but it didn’t matter. Our old grey horse, Charlie, knew the way home.”

Anna Ray was a good student. “I liked spelling and math, but not history,” she recalls. The class would have “bees,” which she often won, in spelling and math; at recess, they would play baseball, croquet, hide-and-seek or drop-the-handkerchief. Her mother made all her clothes by hand, and she has also sewed all her life. At home, she had regular chores, which included cooking breakfast and helping with the housework. She also spent a lot of time practicing her piano-playing. Her Aunt Ethel (the church pianist), was her teacher. Someone from the musically-inclined Craven family had been the pianist since the church’s founding; when her aunt got married in 1923, she chose Anna Ray to play at her wedding. Two years later, Anna Ray became the regular church pianist.

Most of the small town’s social life revolved around school and the church; Anna Ray remembers playing “ring games” (“sort of like a square dance”) with groups of young people. “It was good exercise and a lot of fun.”

At that time, Leander’s school system had only ten grades, so Anna Ray graduated in 1925. There were five girls and four boys in her graduating class. Two years later, she attended 11th grade with four other girls from Leander at Liberty Hill. The girls traveled together, usually in her cousin’s Model T, but sometimes (if the weather was bad) on the train.

In the meantime, at one of those aforementioned ring games, Anna Ray met the man who would eventually become her husband, Edwin Borho. “I remember that he could really swing you, playing ring games,” she recalls. She and Edwin often double-dated with Elmo Noble and Ollie Mae McSpadden, who also eventually married. A typical date would involve “going riding or going to parties.”

It was a beautiful day in January of 1935 when Edwin and Anna Ray finally “tied the knot.” He was 24; she was 26. For a honeymoon, they traveled all the way to Austin, where they watched a movie and spent the night at Austin’s historic Driskill Hotel. They were back in Leander the next day, setting up housekeeping in a rented farmhouse and visiting friends.

It was the middle of the Great Depression, and times were hard for almost everyone. Edwin and Anna Ray had to work hard and long to make ends meet (“We spent a lot of time picking cotton and gathering corn together,” Anna Ray remembers) but they were fortunate in that they “didn’t really want for anything.” Edwin was a farmer, carpenter, grocery store clerk and substitute mail carrier; Anna Ray raised turkeys and chickens and tended the garden when she wasn’t cooking, cleaning or doing the laundry. They didn’t have much money to spend on entertainment, but Anna Ray bought an old “honky tonk” piano “when I sold my first wool,” and church activities kept their social calendar full.

The young couple were blessed with a son (Curtis) in 1937 and a daughter (Peggy) in 1939. Anna Ray took a part-time job as a postal clerk when they were young, and prevailed on her mother to baby-sit the kids while she was at work.

After Curtis and Peggy were grown, the Borhos bought a ranch on Brushy Creek which had belonged to Edwin’s grandmother. They fixed the house up just in time to move in at Christmas, in 1957. The ranch became a gathering place for the whole family; when Curtis and Peggy started families of their own, the grandkids would spend their summers playing there by the creek. “They all had their little chores,” Anna Ray points out, “but they’d have so much fun down by the creek.” Sometimes both families (seven grandkids all together) would spend the weekend at the ranch. That meant “a lot of cooking” for Anna Ray, but lots of fun.

Anna Ray retired from the postal service more than thirty years ago, and Edwin quit farming in 1995, but they remained active in the church – and Anna Ray continued to play the piano every week. She estimates that she has seen between thirty and forty pastors preaching at the old church during her time as pianist.

Anna Ray smiles as she recalls feeling “old” when she became a grandmother. Thirty years ago, some members of the congregation worried about finding a new pianist to replace her when she retired. But even after her husband passed away in 1999, Anna Ray has continued to serve. Family members live all around her on the now-divided ranch, and she needs to have a ride to church, but she lives on her own in the well-kept ranch house and practices on one of her pianos every day. She is remarkably healthy and active for her age, and still plays the piano remarkably well.

The home is filled with memories and family treasures, including (among many other things) two pianos and an organ, stacks of aging sheet music, an old table fashioned from harness hames and a wagon wheel, proclamations and newspaper stories honoring her service, a painting of the ranch house done by Anna Ray’s daughter-in-law and an aerial photograph of the ranch from 1993. She keeps a diary, and years ago filled out a book of memories for her granddaughters, which provides a fascinating insight into life in early Leander.

Anna Ray Borho is one of the last survivors of a remarkable generation who, through hard work and sacrifice, civilized the rugged Texas Hill Country and helped turn it into the vacation and retirement paradise that we enjoy today. It is real honor to have met her.