Aileen Woulfe McCall (1884–1955)

Aileen Gregory Woulfe was born on February 20, 1884, in Lebanon, Laclede County, Missouri. She was the daughter of Richard Downey Woulfe and his second wife, Margaret Shine Lyons Wolfe, both Irish immigrants. Aileen Woulfe had a half-sister, Katherine Collins (b. 1863), whose mother, Margaret O’Kane Wolfe, died in 1865. In addition, she had seven full siblings, all of them older than she: Johanna (b. 1867), Daniel Maurice (b. 1869), Honoria Euphrasia “Honor” (b. 1871), Maurice Patrick (b. 1873), Margaret Theresa (b. 1875), Richard (b. 1878), and Marie Louise (b. 1881).

Richard D. Woulfe had immigrated to the United States in 1849 from County Kerry. He farmed first in LaSalle County, Illinois, and then, beginning early in the 1870s, in Missouri. The son of a breeder, Woulfe loved horses and died from a kick in the head on April 12, 1885, a little more than a year after Aileen Wolfe was born.

By 1900, the family had moved to Angleton, Texas, a small town just south of Houston and near the Gulf Coast. The federal census describes Margaret Woulfe as a milliner and her son Daniel as a farmer. It is unclear what education Aileen Woulfe received.

On February 21, 1914, she married Hawley Sweet McCall in Waco. The couple had three children: Richard Hawley (b. 1917), Maurice Woulfe (b. 1920), and Margaret Frances “Peggy” (b. 1925). In 1921, they built a two-story, 2,320-square-foot house at 3028 Colcord Avenue, in Waco, which still stands.

H. S. McCall, a native of Sabine, Texas, and a graduate of Texas A & M University, began his career as a railroad engineer before founding the McCall-Moore Engineering Company, in Waco, with Bart Moore Jr. At some point, the two were joined by P. J. MacNaughton, and the resulting partnership legally dissolved on November 29, 1921. Soon after, McCall established the McCall Engineering Company and, at the time of his sudden death on February 18, 1939, he was president of the Texas Highway Branch of the Associated General Contractors.

Aileen McCall was active politically and socially. On May 19, 1917, the Waco Morning News reported that she had hosted a well-attended “Suffrage tea” at her home, complete with the Baylor Hawaiian Orchestra for entertainment and “refreshments in the equal suffrage colors, purple and yellow.” She served as the McLennan County chairman of the library extension, and advocated for the county to build its own library. She was a longtime member, and at least twice president, of Waco’s Shakespere Club. In 1926 she played the role of Nick Bottom in a club production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She also belonged to a needlework guild and the Waco Federation of Women’s Clubs.

Aileen McCall died on March 17, 1956, at a hospital in Austin, and is buried with her husband at Oakwood Cemetery in Waco.

Top of the page: Woulfe & Co. postcard, undated (courtesy of Ann McClary)

Selected Sources

“Woulfe & Company to Have an Opening,” Waco Morning News (Texas), November 30, 1913.