I am very interested in some of the pictures from my oldest Glomerata, the 1898, the second one they ever published. Here are a few notes about one of the pictures.
On page 86-87 you find this image and the heading “Our Co-Eds.”
Click to embiggen, and then read these scant little bios.
There is Miss Erin Black, who grew up in Lee County, home to Auburn University.
Miss Dabney Bondurant, who would ultimately marry Clifford L. Hare. Auburn people know him very well. ‘Fessor Hare was the longtime dean of Auburn’s chemistry program. He also played on Auburn’s first football team and would ultimately served the university for more than half a century, the football stadium is named after him. They are both buried in Pine Hill Cemetery, just off campus. Much of their personal correspondence is held in Special Collections at the University of Virginia.
Miss Mary Boyd, the daughter of Auburn’s fifth president David French Boyd, was the wife of Walter Lynwood Fleming. A professor at Vanderbilt, he was the recipient of the dedication in the book “I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition.” David Boyd was pals, before the war, with William Tecumseh Sherman. After the war he started LSU. His daughter, Mary Boyd, pictured here, christened a Liberty Ship during World War II. All of that in the span of one generation of a family.
Ms. Lucile Burton would go on to be the secretary to the university’s board of trustees. She died in 1966. There’s a dormitory named after her today.
Miss Toccoa Cozart was born in Atlanta, and moved with her widowed mother to Montgomery just before the Civil War. She grew up on Perry Street, right in here. She became a school teacher, and attended State Normal College in Florence, Ala. (The modern University of North Alabama) and API, studying English and history, under the great George Petrie. She wrote a biography on Congressman and Ambassador Henry W. Hilliard. Her uncle was Confederate colonel William Howell, who took a famous photograph of the inauguration of Jefferson Davis.
Miss Marian Dawson might shows up in the society pages of The Atlanta Constitution in 1905. Seems she was moving elsewhere. The Internet doesn’t give us much more, however.
Miss Eula Belle Hale was the eighth and Miss Zadie Hale was the fourth of 11 children. They probably often heard the tale: their mother, Josephine, was previously courted by their father Samuel’s brother. But the brother was killed at Chancellorsville. They could trace her family back to early settlers in Massachusetts in 1637 and many fighters of the American Revolution. Eula Belle died in the early 1970s.
Miss Pearl Hanson was only 15 in this picture. She’d live only seven more years. Her brother, Charles, would move to Memphis and become a very successful business man. They’re both buried near their parents in Opelika. Pearl’s husband was Ira Champion, the secretary to Gov. Thomas Kilby. Pearl died just five months after they were married. Ira would stay single, worked as a journalist and finally caught on with the governor. He died in 1942.
Miss Fanny Holstun was born just up the road, one county over in sleepy little Waverly. And that’s all we know of her for now.
Miss Kate Lane stayed in town. She buried her sister in 1942. Her brother-in-law was Dean George Petrie and Kate donated his papers to the university in 1948, the largest donation they’d ever received at that time. She also gave her scrapbooks to the university, where they are held in Special Collections. Here is a picture of both Lane and Petrie. Her father was Gen. James Henry Lane, who was a part of Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg and a hero of the Battle of Bloody Angle (Spotsylvania). She died in 1968, and was buried just off campus. (Update: The General James Henry Lane House, where Kate lived, also appears in the Markers section of the site.)
Miss Lottie Lane was Kate’s sister. While Kate stayed single, Lottie married Matthew Scott Sloan of Birmingham, who also attended API and played football there at the turn of the 20th century. Matthew was a successful railroad man, managing the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Lines in the 1930s, tripling their revenues, and that during the Depression. Before that he worked at General Electric, Birmingam Railway, Light & Power, the New Orleans Railway & Light Company and was president of the Brooklyn Edison Company. Harvard Business School apparently called him one of the 20th century’s great American business leaders.
Miss Jessie Lockhart escapes us entirely. But I did find that she had a younger sister, Katherine, born in 1900. She died, in Auburn, in my lifetime.
Miss Julia Moore married Marion Roby Buckalew. Together they had seven children, including an accountant, two Naval Academy students, an Army officer who retired to become a high-ranking official at Veterans Affairs (who died just a few years ago) and more. She died in 1938.
Miss Hattie Phelps may have become part of a prominent family in Athens, Ala. She could have also lived and died a preacher’s wife in Citronelle, Ala. Now that we’ve covered both ends of the state, via a newspaper and a headstone, the point should also be made that she could have become anything.
Miss Annye Purifoy remains an open mystery.
Miss Mary Robinson was one of the first six young women enrolled at API. (Presumably the rest are also on this list.) She was the second of 10 children, and also from Waverly. She started college with just three years of formal education. She’d go on to be a teacher, and teach all over the state, including just down the road from where I grew up. She attended Howard College (now Samford University, where I teach) for post-graduate work. Her father rode with Gen. Joe Wheeler during the Civil War, and she traced her lineage back to John Hart, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. A remarkable lady, she died in 1955. I found all of this, and more, on a page dedicated to her that was written by Mary Helen Stitzel Benford.
Miss Berta Summers, one of eight children, stayed at home in nearby Opelika. She lost a brother in France in the Great War. A National Register of Historic Places document shows her selling Summers Plantation, a carpenter gothic, to family members in 1954. These days that property is home to the Little Halawakee Wildlife Reserve. The trail for Berta goes cold there.
Not bad for a little Internet searching of people who’ve been gone for decades. It seems they lived full lives of various scope. You’d love to know more details. How many of these young women grew into the suffrage movement, for example?
Next week we’ll check out the 1897-1898 track team.
Hint: They ran fast — for their era.
