Helen Miller Pringle

1928 - 2021

Helen Miller Pringle
February 23, 1928 - September 14, 2021
Leander, Texas - Helen Miller Pringle died peacefully Sept. 14, 2021, in Fort Worth after a brief illness. She was the eldest child of Arthur Clinton Miller and Bonnie Virginia (Ashcraft) Miller. After skipping two grades, she completed R. L. Paschal High School in 1944. She graduated from the University of North Texas, then known as North Texas State Teachers College, in 1948. She taught eighth grade English the next year.
Helen married attorney Brantley Pringle on his 30th birthday, Nov. 24, 1948. Six months later, they lost everything they could not carry overhead in a suitcase in the Trinity River Flood. They cheerfully started over and lived the next 20 years in Fort Worth. The family moved to Hindsight Farm in Parker County, where she raised her family, ran the farm, hosted P.E.O. and bridge parties, tended gardens and dodged copperheads for the next 43 years. She enjoyed a sturdy, loving marriage of 55 years before Brantley's sudden death in 2003. In 2011, she moved to a smaller farm near Leander, Texas.
Helen was an avid reader and an excellent writer and editor. She began editing Brantley's legal writings working in his office in the early years of their marriage, plucking commas from pleadings and relocating dependent clauses. Helen gently edited Brantley's letters, converting his jury argument dictation style to concise English, for which he and the recipients were grateful. In the last 10 years of her life, she was a contributing editor, author and poet for A Simple Life, an Early American magazine.
In the early 1960s she began to collect Early American antiques and was widely known as an expert on 18th and 19th Century furniture. She traveled with her "Four Friends" to New England and consulted at Dolly Johnson's Antique Show at Will Rogers Round Up Inn in the 1980s and 90s. Space limitations finally slowed her collecting but not her travels, as she visited the Yucatán in 2006 to swim in an underground river and explore Mayan ruins with her grandchildren after her 2004 triple bypass surgery.
In the 1980s with children no longer underfoot or at large in Parker County, she fully revealed her creative side. Already an accomplished seamstress and needlepoint artist, she made a limited number of FairChildren New England rag dolls in the style of Izannah Walker, with oil painted features and dressed in antique clothing. She exhibited her work at the Essex Institute in Salem, MA, Heart of Country in Nashville, museums in Los Angeles and many others. These dolls are now prized collectors' items all over the world.
For more than 40 years Helen also hooked woolen rugs in a 19th Century style she made her own. Her works ranged from small drink coasters to a large bed rug for an antique double bed. Her rugs, and patterns have been featured in the Association of Traditional Hooking Artists (ATHA) publications in the past few years. She taught and encouraged many other aspiring "hookers." In her last hours, she secured her daughter Sally's promise to complete the unfinished rug on her frame. She would entrust that to nobody else.
Helen was preceded in death by her parents; sister, Doris Jean Maxwell; and her husband, Brantley Ross Pringle, Sr.
She leaves her brothers, Thomas Richard Miller of Weatherford, Texas and Jerry Glenn Miller of Fort Worth, Texas; daughter, Sarah Virginia Pringle of Austin, Texas; son, Brantley Ross Pringle, Jr., and daughter-in-law, Suzanne (Eidson) Pringle of Austin, Texas and cherished grandchildren, Sarah Isabel Pringle of New York City and Brantley Ross Pringle, III of Austin, Texas. She also left many nieces, nephews, friends and admirers who mourn her passing but are thankful for the time they had with her.
Services: 11 a.m. Tuesday, Sept. 28, 2021, at University Christian Church, Fort Worth, Texas. Interment: Greenwood Memorial Park, Fort Worth.
Memorials: In lieu of flowers, please consider a contribution to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin or your local Food Bank.
-A Friend
"Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come." Rabindranath Tagore