‘my my a dy that we knew as Miss Dee was born in 1881—in a rural community in Macon County, Alabama, that was named La Place.  That was the same year that Booker T. Washington came from Hampton Virginia to nearby Tuskegee, also in Macon County, Alabama, to establish Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University). Her birth on January 23 was less than16 years after Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox. All of the adult Negroes who lived nearby—and there would have been a lot of them in predominantly black Macon County—were former slaves. The Federal government under Andrew Jackson had removed Native Americans from the place in Alabama where she was born only slightly more than forty years before her birth. She was born on what she sometimes called a plantation, located on the Old Federal Road.  The Old Federal Road was the Road over which many Alabama settlers traveled from Georgia to become residents of the Alabama.  General Lafayette, the French general who had assisted in the American Revolution  travelled the Old Federal Road on his tour of America, making one wonder if he was involved in naming La Place, the community where Miss Dee was born. That road, established in 1811, only 70 years before Miss Dee’s birth, had been one of the precipitating causes of the Creek Indian War that gave Andrew Jackson the pretext for the removal of the Indians.

The life of Mary Christine De Bardeleben, whom we called Miss Dee extended over 89 years until she was laid to rest near her mother and father in 1970 in the cemetery in Tuskegee, only 12 miles from the place of her birth. My life overlapped with hers. Her final 28 years were my first 28. She was first a teacher, and then librarian,  in a small, rural Macon County public school at Shorter, Alabama, that I attended for twelve years. It was small indeed: less than one hundred students in grades one through twelve. Everybody, knew everybody, and I knew who she was, by sight, from the time I started school in 1948. She taught in the High School, but by the time I reached High School, she was no longer teaching, but was the librarian.

Let me tell of an event that stands out in my memories about her. I was a 7^th grader at the Shorter public school in Macon County, Alabama. She was the wrinkled old librarian. The event is unforgettable. I do not recall what led up to it.  Perhaps she had substituted for one of our regular teachers, as sometimes happened. But Miss Dee singled me out.  She put the palms of her hands on my cheeks, and with my face between her palms, her gentle, joyful gray blue eyes peered into my face and with one of her big, sort of crooked smiles she said, “You have the face of a college man.”  Out of the blue! Just like that! I had no idea what could have prompted such a comment, but now I know that words of encouragement were part of her way of life.

To fully appreciate her comment, you will need a little more background.  She was quite elderly: in her final year of educational work. I was an awkward, gangly 7^th grader self-consciously feeling my way toward the challenging teenage years, and probably not everyone’s idea of a college prospect. No one in Daddy’s family had ever attended college.  College was not the main thing that I was thinking about at the time. 

I had awakened that morning in a  country home on a dirt road, with no running water, and no vehicle in our yard. That’s where the school bus picked me up.  Although my family was poor, we never noticed, because most of the people we knew were poor—some not quite as poor as we were, but some ever poorer. I caught the Milstead bus to the Shorter public school that morning, as I did every morning. Miss Dee probably knew a lot more about all of that background than I realized at the time. She would have known instinctively the distinction, between what Auburn University historian Wayne Flynt described in his eulogy for Nelle Harper Lee as “white trailer trash” (the Ewells) and “poor but proud” (the Cunninghams), although she would not have applied such labels to anyone. In Flynt’s eulogy, which was an analysis of To Kill a Mockingbird, Flynt does not discuss another important class of southern whites—the one to which Harper Lee herself belonged—but that is the class to which Miss Dee belonged. Universal sainthood is not necessarily an attribute of that class, with its strong consciousness of class differences, but nevertheless, Miss Dee reached out to me, very personally, with a strongly encouraging challenge.  And in her case, sainthood seems to me a possibility!

The cultural chasm between Miss Dee and me was not about money. Acquisition of material wealth was not what her life had been about.  So, it was not like she was wealthy, and me poor. At the time of that incident, during her “twilight years” in the Shorter public school, Miss Dee lived in a small concrete block house that Mr. Parrish, the science teacher had built for her. He built two houses, side by side, almost identical: one for himself and Mrs. Parrish, who taught English, and one for Miss Dee.  Both were on land owned by Dr. Philip Malcolm Lightfoot, a country doctor whose father before him had been a country doctor in the same rural community. Dr. Lightfoot was a member of the Macon County Board of Education. His public mindedness no doubt had a lot to do with a high school science teacher building the two houses on his place for people connected to the school. He was the husband of one of Miss Dee’s first cousins.

Mr. Parrish, who built the houses, seemed to be impressed with my abilities as a student in his 7^th grade science class. His wife, Mrs. Parrish taught me English, and she also probably thought I was a good student. Maybe the two of them had talked to their neighbor, Miss Dee, about me. Who knows? As I said before, the school was extremely small.  All the teachers knew each other and all the students very well. That probably contributed to the strong success of the school.

That was in 1954 or 1955.  Miss Dee had been born in 1881, so she was at least 73 or 74 years old at that time! She had taught English and history in the Shorter School when she first returned to Shorter in 1945 or 46, but by 1954-55 her only job was librarian. But she had been part of the school for at least eight or ten years, and having now dug into her history, I am quite sure that her influence in the school was very significant. The 1950 Shorter School “year book,” called “The Cricket,” was “In dedication to our own beloved ‘Miss Dee.’” We called it a “annual” although it was usually published only every two years. 

As a seventh grader in 1955, I only knew that Miss Dee was the librarian at the Shorter public school. I knew nothing of her life and career. In those carefree days in a small, segregated, country school in predominantly black Macon County, Alabama, we entertained ourselves with rumors that Miss Dee tried to train her little cocker spaniel, “Patsy,” to use a commode.

And there was talk about books that she would not allow in the library, like Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road.” And she did not approve books by Mickey Spillane. I don’t know why I remember those details over sixty years later, and I may be the only living human being who remembers them, so you will have to take my word for it! Naturally, in those days we assumed that she disapproved those books because of the language used in the books: there were some “ugly words.” But now I believe that there were deeper, more personal issues that concerned her. She had spent several years working at Paine College in Augusta Georgia, and established the Bethlehem House in Augusta. Tobacco Road is very close to Augusta.  I will provide more about her work at Paine College and The Bethlehem house in other essays.  With regard to The Grapes of Wrath, she spent many years teaching at the University of Oklahoma.  She was there when the events in the background of The Grapes of Wrath were occurring. I don’t know if she just thought high school students should not read these books, or felt they were not fair portrayals of matters with which she was personally familiar, or if she disapproved them generally. But I suspect that it was because she thought the books disrespectful of people she had known and loved, and that the portrayals were not helpful in the social milieu.

Historical perspective can grow and improve with the passage of time. When I started to school in 1948, I just accepted the Shorter public school as a part of eternal reality, as if it had always been there, and would always be there. But when Miss Dee returned to Shorter in about 1945, that little brick country school building had only been in existence for 7 years. It was practically new, having replaced an old frame building. The school was the community center for the white population in that part of the predominantly Black county.  Macon County schools were gradually progressing from small, one-room schools that provided all the education offered to the poor white country people (mostly “Cunningham’s”, perhaps a few “Ewells,” and a few from the “cut above.” Wayne Flynt tactfully omitted any reference to that “higher class” from his eulogy of Harper Lee, (she being a part of it), although I had heard him describe it in a talk to Judges about To Kill a Mockingbird at an earlier time. Miss Dee had seen a lot of progress in the public education in Macon County over her lifetime, and returned in her retirement to be a part of it.  I describe the Shorter School in more detail in my personal story on this website.  I am now convinced that the role that Miss Dee played in the excellence of the school was significant.

A little background may promote an understanding of the role that public education was playing in the lives of the poor whites in Shorter, Alabama, in those difficult times.  Mrs. Steele Bibb, who would later become the school principal, was listed in the 1926 school year book as a senior. Her daddy was Dr. Lightfoot.  She had been born in 1909, the same year that my Daddy, was born.  But Daddy was listed as a 7^th grader in the 1926 year book. The mergers that had set the stage for the Shorter school had occurred about 1920. In 1926, my Daddy may not have been in school at all since 1920, when the Bradford’s Chapel School merged into the Shorter School. My whole point is that tremendous educational progress had been made in this poor county between 1926, when my Daddy as a gangling, overgrown student attended the 7^th grade at age 17, the when I started to school in 1948. But the schools that the State and County provided for blacks had not been upgraded as much as the white schools.  Even in the 1950’s, although there had been some consolidations of the one room Black schools, I remember that the Black school at Bethel Grove, only a quarter mile from where the Bradford’s Chapel School had been, was still there and in operation, over thirty years after the Bradford’s Chapel School in the same community had been merged into the Shorter School.

But the quality of education in the little Shorter School was excellent. I believe that Miss Dee’s return to the little school in about 1945, even at age 64, had a significant beneficial impact on the quality of public education offered in the rural district that the little Shorter School served.  So, let me return to her story. Somewhere during in the many years that have slipped by since Miss Dee suggested that I had the face of a college man, I learned that Miss Dee had been one of the first female graduates of the University of Alabama, in 1901. In my own meandering career, I acquired and read a copy of Kathryn Windham Tucker’s one actor play about the life of Julia Tutwiler, who was one of the most outstanding women in the history of Alabama.

One of Julia Tutwiler’s many accomplishments was that she convinced the president of University of Alabama that the University should admit women students and that the University should provide housing for women. Julia Tutwiler was president of Livingston State Normal School at the time, and that first class of female admittees with housing at the University, , all graduates of Livingston, was called “Miss Jule’s Girls.” Curiosity led me to the internet a few years ago, where I confirmed that Miss Dee was, indeed, one of Miss Jule’s girls who graduated from the University in 1901. And I had also heard that Miss Dee had worked in Oklahoma. Most of us thought that she had gone to Oklahoma to do missionary work with Native Americans. That might have happened. But that does not appear to be her main activity in Oklahoma: she taught religion at the University of Oklahoma at Norman.

So, over the years, my knowledge and understanding of who Miss Dee was had gradually expanded. But her story is actually much bigger, and more remarkable than these pieces of significant information caused me to realize. But let me explain what brought me to write these essays about Miss Dee. 

My brother, Wade Segrest, married Becky Bibb, who was the daughter of Mrs. Steele Bibb. Mrs Bibb had served as our principal at the Shorter School. Mrs. Bibb’s father, Philip Malcolm Lightfoot, was the country Doctor in Shorter mentioned above. He delivered me into this world, and that is where I got my first name, “Philip,” although he was known by his middle name, “Malcolm,” and I am known by my middle name “Dale.” Mrs. Bibb’s grandfather, Dr. John Lightfoot, the father of Malcolm, was also a country Doctor in Shorter. Dr. Malcolm Lightfoot wife, Mamie Ross Pinkston, was a Miss Dee’s first cousin, and they were very close friends. 

Wade and Becky still live in the old home that had been the home of those Doctors Lightfoot. Mrs. Bibb’s brother, Robert (Bunk) Lightfoot, was also a Doctor. And all three of Dr. Robert Lightfoot’s sons, Bill, John and Dick, pursued careers in medicine. Both Bill and Dick became medical doctors, and John an orthodontist. The three of them are Becky’s first cousins, and almost every year, all of the Lightfoot family returns to the old Lightfoot home place bringing spouses, children and grandchildren and all the connections, for a family reunion. The actual old building that served as a Doctor’s office for 3 generations is still standing! And most of the Lightfoot forebears rest in the nearby Calebee Cemetery. 

I love to cook BBQ, and for many years I have cooked for the Lightfoot reunion: Boston Butts, pork ribs, briskets and camp stew. On October 27, 2018, I again cooked for the Lightfoot reunion. At the reunion, the family often examines family memorabilia. Becky gets out old documents and pictures for the occasion. On the non-Lightfoot side of her family, she is descended from Judge Benajah Smith Bibb, brother of the first two governors of the State of Alabama. The mother of Judge Bibb and the governors was a first cousin of Martha Washington. Believe me, there are lots of documents and pictures, as well as antiques in that house! 

The Bibb family is quite interesting, but this story has to do with Becky’s maternal line of ancestors, the Lightfoot family. As mentioned above, the grandmother of the present Drs. Lightfoot and Becky, Mamie Ross Pinkston Lightfoot, was a first cousin of Miss Dee, and the two of them were very close friends. Miss Dee dedicated one of her books, Songs in the Night, “To M.P.L., Cousin-Sister-Friend, A “Martha” in Loving Thought and Ministry. Although Miss Dee moved about a quite a bit in her career, she apparently always considered Shorter (which now includes the La Place community where she was born) her “home.” It appears that she may have been living and teaching in Shorter in 1935-36, when the book that she dedicated to Mrs. Lightfoot was published, but I have not been able to confirm that yet. Family tradition has it that Dr. and Mrs. Philip Malcolm Lightfoot, Becky’s grandparents, maintained a room (in the house where the Lightfoot reunions now occur) especially for Miss Dee, and during her long and interesting career, she often spent summers with the Lightfoot family. And finally, in 1945 or 1946, at age 64 or 65, she returned to Shorter to teach at the Shorter Public School during her retirement years. She likely lived in the Lightfoot house, until Mr. Parish built a small house for her on Lightfoot property in the early 1950’s.  Initially she taught English and history. But by the time she told me that I had the face of a college man, her only job was librarian. She never stopped encouraging students! Before Mr. Parish built a house for her in the 1950’s, she probably lived in the Lightfoot House. 

Dr. Robert (Bunk) Lightfoot, who passed away in 1982, father of Bill, John and Dick Lightfoot, who have attended the reunions, had helped take care of Miss Dee during her final years.  She had attended his graduation from medical school, along with his family, and by that time had retired to Shorter. 

After Miss Dee died, Dr. Robert Lightfoot and his wife Alice (Bill’s parents) came into possession of some of Miss Dee’s documents.  Daria, Dr. Bill Lightfoot’s wife, brought those documents about Miss Dee to the 2018 reunion. When Becky saw those documents about Miss Dee, she remembered that she had a plastic box there in the Lightfoot house in which some of Miss Dee’s memorabilia were stored, and she dug it out. 

The box was not very large, but contained a treasure of Miss Dee’s “stuff”: pictures, letters, records of her education and other memorabilia that Miss Dee had collected over a lifetime! All in a state of complete disarray, 48 years after Miss Dee’s death, of course. I was totally fascinated by the material! Awestruck! My brother Wade had recently received University of Alabama Alumni magazine identifying and discussing the early female graduates of the University. It featured a picture of the first graduating class that included women, and there was Miss Dee, although she was not mentioned by name. My curiosity was thoroughly piqued! Glancing through the disorganized information in the box, I immediately realized that there was a story here that needed to be told. And because she had believed that I had the face of a college man, and now I had access to this information, I felt compelled undertake to tell the task of telling her story! 

I suspect that almost everyone has a box or drawer where they keep their treasured personal “stuff.” I have one. Mine is a wornout Baby Ruth Candy Box from the 1950’s! You know what I mean: a box or drawer full of stuff that means little to anyone else, but everything to the owner! I immediately seized upon the idea of examining Miss Dee’s stuff, researching the leads, and writing her story. I had retired as a Circuit Judge 18 years earlier, and re-entered the practice of law. But just days before the 2018 Lightfoot reunion I had announced my (almost complete) retirement from law practice. In the material that I found in Miss Dee’s box, I saw the perfect opportunity to fulfill one of my retirement goals.  I had always wanted to write about the Shorter School, and a way of life that it represented, but that is now poorly understood. And here was the opportunity to tell the story of a woman who started out in that community, always considered it “home,” watched it develop, and returned to it to teach in that school, and lived to see its short history conclude under the stresses of the Civil Rights Movement. 

Her story is the fascinating story of a devoted Southern Christian Missionary/Teacher. Her life was deeply embedded in the work of the Methodist Church, most of it in the Methodist Episcopal Church South, before the merger.  The Methodist Church has also been an important part of my life. I think Miss Dee would have been proud to know that the guy with the “face of a college man” graduated from Huntingdon College (affiliated with the United Methodist Church), served as Lay Leader of the Alabama West Florida Conference, attended a number of General and Jurisdictional Conferences of the United Methodist Church, and eventually chaired the board of trustees of Huntingdon College. I tell about all these things in my own memoirs on this website, but mention them her to explain my reasons for researching and writing about Miss Dee. Against this background, I found the prospect of writing about a Miss Dee and her Methodist work very exciting. The successes and new roles that women have achieved in recent year did not just happen. There were important pioneers like Miss Dee who blazed the trails. Here is an opportunity to look at the life of a true pioneer in the advancement of women! 

Everyone liked the idea that I should examine Miss Dee’s box! So, I began the examination. The box was not organized. It was not an index of Miss Dee’s activities. It was a hodgepodge of miscellany. The clues to story were there, but had to be extracted! I suspect that during the many years since Miss Dee’s death in 1970, it had been thoroughly shuffled. No doubt, Miss Dee could have lovingly identified every picture and every document, but no one else ever can or ever will! But it contained personal memorabilia that would have been priceless to her. It contained scraps and hints of the life work of a truly exceptional woman! It included poetry and writings on which her mind and spirit had fed. Digging into it, I experienced the excitement that an archeologist might feel, examining a new archeological find. But going through the box was not like reading a book! Organization was necessary. Hours of meditation about significance were necessary. Additional research into many sources was necessary.  But these scraps of paper reluctantly revealed clues to a magnificent story. 

Wow! I had no idea what a career Miss Dee had led: she was a precursor of the currently developing role of women on the planet earth! My journey of exploration and examination of the story of an all but forgotten avant garde woman has been an unforgettable experience. The material in the box provided clues that led to other information, and ultimately to discovery of many details of the beautiful life of a woman ahead of her times. In the box—at two separate places—I found two cards approximately 3×5, one printed front and back, all with very small print: 1901 Commencement Week! Graduation with the first females to graduate from the University of Alabama was not the end of Miss Dee’s story. True to the real meaning of the word commencement, that was the commencement—the beginning—of a magnificent career of service.  

Miss Dee was born in troubled times in Alabama.  She arrived on January 23, 1881 in rural Macon County in a community that was known back then as La Place. It is now considered a part of the Shorter community, but is not in the town limits of the recently incorporated Town of Shorter.  It lies east of the present Town of Shorter, but is within the postal ZIP Code assigned to the Shorter Post Office. 

Miss Dee’s mother was Sarah Rebecca Haden.  The Haden family migrated into Alabama from South Carolina, which was a very common migration pattern in the early settlement of Alabama.  Times were very hard, and life was uncertain.  Jesse Thompson married Sarah’s older sister Susan in 1868, but Susan died in 1868, and Jesse married Sarah in 1869.  They had a son, Jesse Haden Thompson, who was Miss Dee’s older half sibling, in 1872.  But then Sarah’s husband, Jesse Thompson, Died in 1873.  Miss Dee’s mother, Sarah, married her father, John Finley DeBardeleben in 1877, and, William Joseph Debardeleben, Miss Dee’s older brother, was born to them March 10, 1878.  Then Miss Dee was born in 1881, but her mother, Sarah, died on March 13, 1883, when Miss Dee was only 2 years old. Four months later, her father John Finlay DeBardeleben, married her mother’s sister, Mary Alice Elizabeth Haden, who helped to raise Miss Dee.  After Miss Dee’s mother’s death, her father and her aunt/stepmother had five more children:  John Thomas, Charles Allen, Ethel, Robert Francis, and Sara Capitola. Then her father, John Finlay DeBardeleben died in 1892, when she was only eleven years old, and Miss Dee became an orphan. Her older brother, Jesse Haden Thompson died in 1893.  These many early deaths reflect the difficulties of the time.  The fact that Miss Dee was an orphan makes her story all the more remarkable.  Miss Dee reported in the 1960 newspaper article by Ms. Tyson that she was largely raised by her maternal grandmother Elizabeth Oldfield Haden, whose husband Joseph Thomas Haden had died in 1877, four years before Miss Dee was born.

Miss Dee’s father, John Finlay DeBardeleben, was a Methodist Preacher. Miss Dee’s grandfather, John Arthur DeBardeleben, enlisted in the Confederate army in 1864. John Finlay DeBardeleben’s grandfather was born in South Carolinan

The La Place community was located on the Old Federal Road. Pioneers had poured into Alabama, or, more accurately, bogged and bumped their way into Alabama through the Creek Indian territory that included what is now Macon County over that road.  The Old Federal Road was built to connect the East Coast States and Washington D.C. to the newly acquired (1803) Louisiana Purchase. The construction of the Federal Road in 1811, cutting through the Creek Indian territory a mere 70 years before Miss Dee’s birth.  The construction was a precipitating cause for the Creek Indian Wars in 1812-13 &14, which was related to the concurrent War of 1812.  Macon County, where Miss Dee was born, was located in, and had been a part of the Creek territory, before it was ceded to the United States in the 1830’s.  The great Indian war leader, Tecumseh, had come from Ohio only 70 years before Miss Dee’s birth, and delivered his famous fiery speech at Tuckabatchee, which is located not more than 15 miles from where she was born.  But Andrew Jackson defeated the Creek Indians at nearby Horseshoe Bend in 1813. 

So, General Andrew Jackson defeated the Creek Indians in those wars, and after he became President of the United States, he made arrangements to remove them from their homes and lands during the 1830’s.  The removal occurred less than Fifty years before Miss Dee’s birth. Alabama became a State only 62 years before her birth. The Civil War was silenced at Appomattox only 16 years before her birth. The end of the war brought hard times for Alabama.  The agrarian economy was upended by the War, and was struggling to reassert itself on a new footing.  A former slave, Booker T. Washington came down from Hampton Virginia to Tuskegee, only 16 miles from her birthplace, to establish what is now Tuskegee University in the very year that Miss Dee was born. Miss Dee is buried in the Tuskegee Cemetery, located near the University. The proximity in time of her birth to these significant events that have left cultural imprimaturs on history itself magnifies the awesome significance of the story of her life and works that I am about to tell.

During the period of time that preceded Miss Dee’s birth, especially before the Civil War, Alabama was known as part of the Southwest, and with passage of time the Old Southwest. The raucous, turbulent nature of those pioneering pre-Civil War times in Alabama were described in Flush Time in Alabama and Mississippi, by Joseph Glover Baldwin, first published in 1853. His writings were humorous, and he rivaled Mark Twain in popularity at the time. All of the adults who surrounded Miss Dee at the time of her birth were a part of that tumultuous time: a time that is now largely forgotten. That is the world that shaped mindsets in her natal surroundings. But her life and works also shows that there was also, very obviously, gentility.

An article in 1960 in Montgomery’s Alabama Journal by Katharine Tyson, that I found in the box containing Miss Dee’s stuff, appears to be based on a personal interview.  It indicates that Miss Dee was proud to be a Southerner:

Mrs. DeBardeleben says she is a child of the old south. Not one ancestor whose lineage she has been able to trace ever lived north of the Mason-Dixon line.

The 1960 Tyson Alabama Journal article further states:

“Miss De Bardeleben was raised by her grandmother. The family lived in the village of La Place, now Shorter, 15 miles from Tuskegee.”

The DeBardeleben’s were among the first white settlers of Macon County. Miss Dee’s great grandfather, William Arthur Debardeleben was buried in the LaPlace Cemetery in 1838—in close proximity to the time that native Americans were being removed from Macon County by the Federal Government. He had been born in the Orangeburg District of South Carolina in 1802, and died in Macon County at the young age of 36.

Elizabeth Oldfield Haden, the grandmother who helped raise Miss Dee, must have been a very strong woman. Her husband died in 1877—six years before the death of Miss Dee’s mother. The grandmother raised at least 10 children of her own, and some of them were still minors when her daughter, Sarah, Miss Dee’s mother, died. The Haden’s lived on what Miss Dee sometimes called a plantation on the Old Federal Road in a community then called La Place.  Her father’s family also owned a plantation in the Blackbelt portion of Macon County in a community called Cotton Valley.

The place where Miss Dee was born, as the crow flies, was within a couple of miles of the spot where I was born. I should make it clear that I was not born on a plantation.  I was born on the north side of Calebee Swamp, and by road is probably three miles from where she was born on the south side of the swamp.

But back to the Haden plantation. The house where Miss Dee was born has been gone for a long time. The place is no longer called the Haden plantation. But old names tend to linger.  Haden Hill, is on the far side of Calebee Swamp from the place where I was born, was included in the Haden plantation. It is a hill that rises from the alluvial plane of Calebee swamp, on the road that leads through Calebee swamp from the old Milstead community where I was born to the La Place community where Miss Dee was born. The hill still bears the Haden name. I remember riding a wagon load of cotton pulled by mules to a cotton gin in what used to be the La Place community with my Daddy on that road that was still a clay gravel road when I was very small.

The Haden’s were Baptists. They are buried in the La Place Baptist Church Cemetery.  Interestingly, internet sources list Sweet Gum Cemetery as the burial place.  That is probably because the cemetery has a Black section and a white section, and nearby Sweet Gum Church often uses the Black section for burial of its members. But the cemetery began as the cemetery for the LaPlace Baptist Church, a white church.  The LaPlace Baptist Church was gone long before I was born. Miss Dee attended the La Place Baptist Church with her Grandmother as a small girl, but Miss Dee’s father was a Methodist preacher, and she joined the Methodist Church at age 11: just after her father died.  There have been no white interments in the cemetery in many, many years.

There was a one room school at La Place, that was located near the La Place Methodist Church, and it is possible, but not entirely clear that Miss Dee attended that school as a child. I am not clear about when the school came into being. It merged into the Shorter School in 1920. Miss Dee would have been 39 years old in 1920.   After graduating from the University of Alabama and the Teachers College at Columbia University, the Tyson article seems to indicate that Miss Dee taught at that one room school.

I hope to learn more about Miss Dee’s childhood, and if so, I will expand this post.  But from what I have discovered, it is clear that her childhood was challenging, and as we will see, she accepted the challenge, and lived her lifetime responding to challenges.

In the Southern United States, questions like, “Who are her folks?” have always been popular. Such questions are often used jokingly now, as satire of the Old South. But the truth is that family—extended family—was an important part of the structure of culture. Cultural structure is much more complex than just family relationships, but that was and is part of the structure.  The cultural structure includes the racial division, but there is internal structure in both the black and white sub-cultures. Wayne Flynt has capably described the structure that exists within the white segment of Southern culture, in discussions of the popular book, To Kill a Mockingbird, notably in his eulogy of the author, Harper Lee.[1] In his analysis of the book, he shows that there are cultural differences between the family of Atticus Finch, the small-town lawyer, and the Cunningham’s, the salt of the earth respectable country people. But then there are the Ewells, “the undesirables who joined the KKK and lynch mobs. William Faulkner epitomized that class in his short story Barnburners. Harper Lee herself may have just taken for this structure for granted as a part of reality.  But she captured it beautifully, and I believe that it was part of the art of her writing.  Her writing exposed the fallacies of the belief system that confirmed that structure.

Miss Dee was justly proud of her southern heritage, and it will be appropriate to describe her family and the community structure of which she was a part. Although it would be totally impossible to recreate in words the family and community structure in which she was nurtured well over a hundred years ago, perhaps we can recapture some feel for the environment.

In the previous essay, A Challenging Childhood, I described Miss Dee’s immediate family.  And in the essay Introducing Mary Christine De Bardeleben, I described her relationship to Mrs. Lightfoot.  And I have mentioned churches that were an important part of her childhood community.  But my research into Miss Dee’s family and description of the community that produced her is not complete and I hope to supplement this section.  Help from any reader who happens to have information will be appreciated.

[1] Mockingbird Songs, Wayne Flynt (2017)

I have included this post, although incomplete, in order to describe the broad outline of the life of Mary Christine De Bardeleben.  I plan to develop it further.  I would welcome any information that anyone has dealing with this part of her life.

In a 1960 article in the Alabama Journal, a Montgomery Newspaper, writer Katherine Tyson described Miss Dee as “a natural teacher.” Her assessment is borne out by a letter that Merton Robertson had written to Miss Dee two years earlier, in 1958

“Dear Miss Mary, 

64 years ago this month a little 6 year old boy sat on a wooden bench over by the west wall of the upper room at the Haden place. And his teacher was a 13 year old girl. He thought then that she was a wonderful girl.

Now an old man three score and ten, he thinks you are a wonderful girl still.

Lots of Love

Merton”

Merton was a member of the Robertson family from Shorter.  He was a first cousin to Dr. Malcolm Lightfoot, who I mentioned in the Introduction, and whose wife was a first cousin to Miss Dee.  As evidenced by the letter, he was a little younger than Miss Dee. He had moved to Tallassee. A faithful member of the Tallassee Methodist Church, the “Old Men’s” Sunday School Class at First United Methodist Church still bears his name. 

When Miss Dee turned to writing in the 1930’s, it was to write Bible studies for women’s groups, with careful directions as to how to use the material: always the teacher! 

During her long and useful teaching career, Miss Dee logged in 40 years of teaching, according to a note that I found in the box. The hand-written note lists 14 years in teaching Alabama that included 9 at Shorter. It lists 4 years in Georgia, that apparently do  not include 6 at Paine College, because they  are listed separately. It indicates that she spent at total of eleven years at Oklahoma University, and other evidence makes it clear that those years were not consecutive. She spent four years in Lubbock Texas, teaching at Texas Tech. The passage of time, and death of the people who knew her well makes it difficult to recreate an exact chronicle of her teaching career, but I will try to reconstruct that time table as we continue to study her career in depth.  If you have any information or suggestions about where I might locate further information, please share it with me. 

The following is a chronological listing of Miss Dee’s academic career that I have been able to piece together.  There may be more.  But this timeline shows Miss Dee’s lifelong commitment to learning:

• 1895 Completed high school in Montgomery.
• 1898 Completed two years at Alabama Normal School at Livingston, Alabama for an Associate’s Degree;
• 1901 Completed her A.B. Degree from the University of Alabama, sharing summa  cum laude honors with a male student;
• 1902 Completed a B.S Degree from Teacher’s College at Columbia University in New York;
• 1910 Completed training for missionary work at The Methodist Training School in Nashville, TN;
• 1921 M.A. Peabody College, Nashville, TN;
• 1923 Course work at University of Chicago Divinity School;
• 1929-30 Studied for a year at Boston University.;
• 1936 Certification Course work at Alabama Polytechnic Institute (now Auburn University) through its extension service in Tuskegee to qualify for teaching in Alabama;
• 1940 Course work at Oklahoma University;
• 1943 Course work at Emory University.

Miss Dee was not a “professional student.”  Her studies were always with a purpose. Her work at the University of Alabama and at Teachers College, Columbia qualified her to teach.  She then taught in Macon County public schools and at Alabama Normal School at Livingston.  Her work at The Methodist Training School qualified her for missionary work, and most of the remainder of her career was connected to various forms of missionary work.  She was truly a woman with a mission.  She taught at Paine College in Augusta GA while working to establish The Bethlehem House in Augusta. Her master’s degree from Peabody qualified her for College work, and she taught at Oklahoma University. She did not receive a degree, as best I can tell, from Boston University, but after her work there, she taught at Texas Tech.  Her course with API extension service (Auburn) qualified her to teach in Alabama public schools, and she taught at Shorter for a number of years.  I am not clear yet about her work at Emory University in the 1940’s, and don’t know if she also taught there.  She also had some connection in those years, before returning to Shorter, in Macon County, AL in 1945, with Gammon Theological Seminary.

This outline of her studies reflects the structure of her career. My description of her career will move from point to point in her personal educational and teaching experiences. 

ry Christine De Bardeleben completed high school in Montgomery in 1895, according to documents that I obtained from Columbia University that dealt with her admission there.  She would have been only 14 years old at the time.  She was admitted to Alabama Normal School at Livingston, Alabama in 1895.  The line between secondary and post-secondary education in those days was not as clearly defined as it is today.  That might mean that it is a mistake to immediately label her as “precocious”, in that many “colleges” admitted what would now be considered high school students.  But she finished Alabama Normal School in 1898, and was admitted to the University of Alabama that same year, at age 17.  And she received her degree from the University of Alabama in 1901, at age 20, as one of its first female graduates.

It appears that she was able to advance in keeping with her own gifted capabilities.  I am not sure that is as possible today as it was then. Unfortunately, I have not been able to figure out where Miss Dee attended high school in Montgomery, or how she managed to enroll there, or what her living arrangements were while she attended high school there. 

I have no indication about how Miss Dee came to choose Alabama Normal School.  But in her brilliant career, it certainly seems that her contact with the brilliant Julia Tutwiler, was a fortunate choice.  It seemed to make a major impact on Miss Dee’s developmental processes.  My Name is Julia, the one-woman play by Kathryn Tucker Windham, relates how Julia Tutwiler, with tacit approval from her father, a college president, undertook to teach Black slave children to read, when she was a child herself.  But very significantly for the purposes of this website, the play also relates how Julia Tutwiler also taught poor white children.  Miss Dee certainly concerned herself with the social welfare of the Black culture.  But her final “mission” was to the poor whites in Macon County, where she had been born.  Her final mission was teaching at the Shorter Public school in Macon County, and I tell the story of that school on this website.

Julia Tutwiler played a major role in prison reform, and establishing separate facilities for juveniles, both Black and white. During the progressive era, she worked with Booker T. Washington in this important endeavor.

These progressive ideas must have had major impact on the developing Christian faith that motivated Miss Dee to her life work.  No doubt, the influence of Julia Tutwiler played a major role not only in Miss Dee’s call to missionary work, but in the transition of that call from missionary work in Japan to missionary work among Blacks in the south.  While the fact that Miss Dee was in the first class of campus dwelling females to graduate from the University of Alabama is very impressive, after studying her career, I realized that the strongest influence in her educational development was her association with Julia Tutwiler at Alabama Normal School. Not only did Julia Tutwiler open the way to the University for females, and choose Miss Dee, her work with Blacks was a precursor of Miss Dee’s “call” to mission work with southern Blacks.  Miss Dee would later establish a mission for Blacks—The Bethlehem House—in Augusta Georgia.  But her work with poor whites was equally important in providing a role model for Miss Dee.  Miss Dee was truly a protégé of Julia Tutwiler.

I am sure that I have not collected all the information about Miss Dee’s work at Livingston, and about the influence of Julia Tutwiler.  I am seeking more information, and would be delighted to receive information. 

I have included this post, although incomplete, in order to describe the broad outline of the life of Mary Christine De Bardeleben.  I plan to develop it further.  I would welcome any information that anyone has dealing with this part of her life.

For Miss Dee, getting admitted to the University of Alabama in 1898 was not just a matter of completing her work at Alabama Normal School, getting the necessary forms and applying for admission to the University.  She was a member of first class the first female students to be admitted to the University of Alabama with housing on campus. Julia Tutwiler, president of Alabama Normal School in Livingston mounted a campaign that convinced the University to accept women students and to provide on campus housing. Kathryn Tucker Windham has captured the adventuresome spirit of Julia Tutwiler in her one-person play, My Name is Julia.

The play portrays Julia Tutwiler’s efforts to have women admitted to the University. After describing the efforts leading up to the decision to admit women, the actress portraying Julia Tutwiler describes the admission of her students from Livingston, which included Miss Dee.  The play presents this dramatic event as follows:

“It was five years later (after the decision to admit women to the University, which occurred in 1893) before any of my Livingston girls attended the University. Lack of proper housing was the hindrance. A few Tuscaloosa girls enrolled in the university each year, but housing for boarding students, women boarding students, was not available. This was an inexcusable impediment.

“So I accosted the University’s president. “You must provide proper on campus housing for the women students,” I told him. “Your men students have dormitories. The same should be available for women.”

“Amazingly, he agreed with me!

“’I promise to provide a house on campus if you can find ten qualified students to live in it,” he told me.’

“Even as he spoke, I was making mental selections of those ten students.

“Back at Livingston, I assembled my faculty and said to them, “We must select ten of our finest students to attend the university next fall. Each girl must excel in academics, must have pleasing manners and must have a reputation above reproach. And she must have parents who will allow her to take part in this educational advance.”

“Selections were carefully, carefully made. When I met in my office with the ten girls who were chosen, I congratulated them, but I warned them. “When you enroll as university students, you may be subjected to insulting remarks and crude jokes. Some of your professors may give you unreasonable assignments, seeking to discourage you.

“You have a heavy responsibility. Unless your achievements and deportment are exemplary, our efforts to open the University of Alabama to women will likely fail. God bless you.”

“In the fall of 1898, my ten girls and their chaperone moved into a two-story residence on Tuscaloosa Avenue near the president’s home. They named that residence for me, Julia Tutwiler Annex.

*  *  *

“I was more than pleased when, at the end of that first year as university students, my ten girls won 66% of the academic honors.”

Our Miss Dee finished summa cum laude, sharing the honor with a male student.

Although this is merely a dramatic portrayal, intended for the stage, I believe that it captures and accurately describes the spirit of the historical events. And it provides great insight about the kind of person that both Julia Tutwiler and Miss Dee were. As described in the introductory essay in this series, Miss Dee completed the University of Alabama and graduated with the 1901 class.

While at the University, Miss Dee served on the editorial staff of the school newspaper, The Crimson White, in the 1900-1901 school year.  The Crimson White was first published in 1894.  The following poem entitled The Senior Walk, written by Miss Dee, is found in the November 2^nd, 1900, edition of the Crimson White:

Say, have you seen the Senior Walk?

Have not? –then listen while I tell

Of airs that pass beyond expression,

The Senior—Oh he is a “swell”!

He has a golden headed care,

He sways with grace quite bel,

Describing charming airy curves,

The Senior—sure, he is a “swell”!

He never sees the “sophs” and “rats”

That daily cross his path—Oh well,

He holds his head erect, you know,

The Senior who’s so “swell”.

O Senior, proud of step and mien,

It can’t be said that man ne’er fell,

And the “last great day” in June, my friend,

‘Twill not suffice to be a “swell.”

M.C.D.

Of all the writings by Miss Dee and descriptions that I have seen of Miss Dee, this poem is the most like advocacy! She obviously understood the significance of being one of Miss Jule’s Girls in what had been an all-male military school.

I believe that Miss Dee affiliated with the Young Women’s Christian Association as fully as possible, throughout her career.  In those days, many college campuses with female students had YWCA Chapters.  There may have been a chapter in Tuscaloosa at the time she was enrolled at the University of Alabama, but I have not been able to find actual information yet. 

Writing in 1960, after interviewing Miss Dee, who would have been 79 years of age at the time, Alabama Journal reporter Katharine Tyson wrote “During a YWCA summer conference, she vowed to become a missionary to Japan, but found due to her age she was too young for the position. But holding steadfast to her determination to go to Japan she planned to continue teaching until she could get an appointment.” The newspaper article did not make it clear when this call to missionary work occurred.

After she completed her work at the University of Alabama, Miss Dee had returned to Livingston to teach for Julia Tutwiler at Alabama Normal School in 1901-02.  Sources at the University of West Alabama, formerly Alabama Normal School, indicate that there is no evidence in the archives of a YWCA chapter on campus during the 1900-1901 school year, but there was an active chapter in 1901-1902, the year that Miss Dee returned to Livingston and taught there. Was she involved in creating the chapter? I can’t really say, but when she returned, YWCA was active on campus.

Another source indicates that Miss Dee received the call to missionary work “while teaching with Julia Tutwiler at Alabama Normal School.”  Because it was seven years after she taught at Alabama Normal School in 1901-1902 before she was actually admitted to The Methodist Training School in Nashville for missionary training in 1908, I have examined her activities between those dates as carefully as I can to try to figure out exactly when she received the call to missionary work.

It is clear that she actually worked at Alabama Industrial School for Girls in Montevallo as secretary of the YWCA on that campus in 1907.  And in that capacity, she actually was involved in organizing summer conferences.  Miss Tyson’s Alabama Journal article also mentions that after completing her work at Columbia, Miss Dee returned to Macon County and taught in a one room school, grades one through twelve.  That would likely have been the one room school at La Place, near the place of her birth and the residence of her grandmother.  It is not clear how long she taught there.

However, in 1906, records from Birmingham Southern indicate that Miss Dee, along with her friend, Rosalie Tutwiler, an alumna of Southern, visited the campus of Southern University in Greensboro, Alabama, and that both were on faculty at Alabama Normal School at the time.  Miss Dee’s younger half-siblings were enrolled at Southern at the time.  (Southern is a predecessor of Birmingham Southern College.)  Records from the University of West Alabama neither confirm nor disaffirm whether Miss Dee was on faculty there in 1906.  The records of faculty members for that year are missing.

Katharine Tyson also reported:

“Several months later, on Christmas Eve, to be exact, her uncle who had taken over the management of the farm announced all the Negroes on the farm were intoxicated. Then and there, Miss De Bardeleben says after a sleepless night she made up her mind, she was needed far more at home to teach among southern Negroes than she was needed in Japan.”

She goes on to state that Miss Dee tried to devise ways of teaching in her own county, but eventually her application for missionary training was accepted.

After carefully examining all the historical data that I have been able to locate, I believe that Miss Dee attended the YWCA summer conference and was called to missionary work during the year that she taught at Alabama Normal School with Julia Tutwiler immediately after completing her studies at the University of Alabama.  She was only 20 years old at that time, and it makes sense that she was too young to train for missionary work at that time.  She planned to keep teaching, until she was eligible, so she enrolled at Teachers College at Columbia.  She returned to La Place and taught at the one room school there, as reported by Katharine Tyson. It is not clear how long that continued, but at some point, she apparently returned to Livingston, and taught there in 1906, at least.  There is evidence that her family had moved to west Alabama by then, where her younger half-siblings were enrolled at Southern University. Then in 1907, she served as secretary for the YWCA chapter at what is now Montevallo University.  And in 1908 she enrolled for missionary training at The Methodist Training School in Nashville. I will pick up on her work there in another essay.  Her connections with YWCA would continue throughout her career.

I found the documents pictured above in the box of material containing Miss Dee’s memorabilia.

Miss Dee completed her Degree at Columbia University Teachers College in 1903.

The Columbia 1903 Commencement Program from Miss Dee’s Box

Kathrine Tyson, who interviewed Miss Dee for her Alabama Journal article in 1960 indicated that after completing her work at Columbia, Miss Dee returned to the one room school teach.  I believe that would have been the one room school at LaPlace. Because that article was based on a personal interview, I believe that the information is accurate.  But the records are not entirely clear concerning Miss Dee’s activity after completing her work at Columbia. Records from about 1915 from The Methodist Training School in Nashville indicates that Miss Dee “Taught several years at State Normal School Livingstone (sic) Alabama” and “One year secretary Y.W.C.A.,” and “Alabama Girls’ Industrial School, Montevallo, Ala,” before her admission to the Missionary Training School in 1908.” They make no mention of her teaching in the one room school at LaPlace.  But as you can see, these entries themselves are not totally clear and unambiguous.  The only time that I have been able to clearly confirm that she taught at Livingston is before she went to Columbia, where the year, 1901-1902, is confirmed by records.

The Alabama Girls Industrial School that is referred to in the Methodist Training School records had resulted from efforts of Julia Tutwiler to provide vocational educational opportunities for women in Alabama. Julia Tutwiler was offered, but turned down its presidency to remain at Livingston. The school that originated as Alabama Girls Industrial School is now The University of Montevallo. I have confirmed that Miss Dee was secretary of the YWCA at Alabama Girls Industrial School in 2007-2008, just before her admission to Methodist Training School in 1908. The Tyson article indicates that she got her call to missionary work while teaching at Livingston, but was too young for admission.  Apparently she went to Colombia Teacher’s College as an interim measure.  That certainly sounds like something Miss Jule would have encouraged.  Incidental records from Birmingham Southern, dating back to its predecessor, Southern University in Greensboro, Alabama, indicates that she visited family members there in 1906, and that she was serving on the faculty at Livingston at that time, but again, the Livingston records are incomplete, and do not confirm that fact. As stated above, the Tyson article was based on a personal interview, and therefore is credible.  Based on all evidence that I have been able to discover, it appears that Miss Dee returned to LaPlace and taught at the one room school there after finishing her work at Columbia.  Apparently, one Christmas Eve, while she was there, she came to the conclusion that her missionary work needed to be among Blacks in the South instead of Japan.  I have not been able to ascertain when she left her teaching post at the one room school at LaPlace and went back to teach at Livingston with her mentor, Julia Tutwiler.

 For Mary Christine De Bardeleben, Macon County was always home.  She returned there again and again.  That pattern began early in her career.  After completing her teacher’s degree at Columbia Teachers College, Miss Dee returned to Macon County to teach in the one room public school at La Place.  No doubt, at that time her grandmother was still living on the plantation at La Place, and Miss Dee returned to live with her, within walking distance of the Laplace one room School.  After the death of her grandmother Haden, she would usually stay with her cousin, Mamie Ross Lightfoot, and her husband, Dr. Philip Malcolm Lightfoot.  After retirement, when she had returned to teach at the Shorter public school, she had her own house, built by fellow teacher, Ralph Parrish, on land gifted by the Dr. and Mrs. Lightfoot.

In the 1960 interview, with reporter Katharine Tyson, Miss Dee explained that in her initial teaching job in Macon County, she taught “all grades from alphabet to advanced arithmetic.”  That was after she finished at Columbia, and before 1906.  Public education was just beginning to develop in Macon County, and one room schools dotted the Macon County countryside. Usually there was only one teacher, and that was the case with the La Place school. 

The one room school at La Place was Miss Dee’s first teaching job in Macon County but it would not be her last. There is scanty evidence, and at least a possibility that she returned to back Macon County as a teacher in the mid-thirties.  She took course work from what is now Auburn University extension service in Tuskegee in 1936 to qualify for teaching, but I have found no evidence of actual employment in Macon County in that time frame.  After 1936, she was back at Oklahoma University, as I discuss in another post.  Her final teaching mission was at the Shorter public school.  That likely began in 1945. Over a lifetime of teaching and missionary work, Miss Dee saw much progress in education in the County that she loved and always called home, to which she always returned. From her broad perspective, she saw, and tried to address the intense needs, in the public education system in the County. 

I have included this post, although incomplete, in order to describe the broad outline of the life of Mary Christine De Bardeleben.  I plan to develop it further.  I would welcome any information that anyone has dealing with this part of her life.

In her 1960 Montgomery Advertiser article, reporter Katherine Tyson stated, “’Miss Mary’ is first last and always a Methodist.” That is likely a quote from a personal interview. The life work of Miss Dee bears out its truth. She was trained as a Methodist missionary, and elected to do mission work among Blacks in the South.  She pursued education, and taught Bible and religion under the auspices of the Methodist Womens Missionary Council.  Her father, and two brothers were Methodist preachers.

In 1934, at age 53, Miss Dee gave the history of the La Place Methodist Church as part of its centennial celebration. Miss Dee presentation was an informal, conversational history of the Church, based mainly on her own recollections. In it, she reported:

I did not claim this church as mine when I was a little girl. My Baptist Aunt and Grandmother carried me to their Sunday school held regularly in the old Baptist Church in La Place.

Although she attended the La Place Baptist Church, she never joined that Baptist Church.  Later in the same historical account she reported her childhood Baptist experience with good humor:

Old dear brother Dowdell I stood in awe. Even while I loved him, I avoided him. For he was always enquiring into the state of my little girl’s soul and insisting that I should have a happy, shouting conversion experience.

The year that Brother Skipper * * * came to this charge, my father had just died, and that same little girl’s soul found expression for its love and loyalty by joining the church that father had served so unselfishly, so devotedly thru the years. I became a Methodist and this became my church.

Her father had indeed “served so unselfishly.”  According to historical records of the United Methodist Church, her father, John Finlay DeBardeleben, was converted under the ministry of Rev. B. B. Rose in 1868 at the Union Church, which was part of the Tuskegee Circuit.  It was located just a few miles up the road from La Place, between La Place and Tuskegee.  He was licensed to preach on Nov 27, 1880 by the quarterly Conference of the Tuskegee Circuit.  He was received into full connection in the Alabama Conference and ordained a Deacon in December, 1884 by Bishop Keener at Opelika.  He was ordained an Elder by the same Bishop on December 11, 1887 at Greensboro. 

He was assigned to a circuit in Barbour County, and preached his last sermon in Louisville in February of 1892.  He died in March of 1892 in the parsonage at Louisville.  It is not clear that Miss Dee was living with her father at the time of his death, because, by her own account, as reported by Mrs. Tyson in the Alabama Journal in 1960, she was largely raised by her maternal Grandmother Haden.  Her father was married to her mother, Sarah, at the time he was licensed to preach in 1880.  But by the time he was ordained, and received into full connection, Sarah had died, and her father had married Sarah’s sister Mary.

The account that Miss Dee gave at the 1934 Centennial Celebration at LaPlace reveals that she did not join the Methodist Church while her father was still living, but hints that the fact that her father was Methodist preacher may have influenced her decision. 

As mentioned above, Miss Dee had two brothers who became Methodist preachers.  Her older brother, William Joseph Haden, who was her mother’s son, born in 1878, became a preacher and preached in Georgia. He delivered the sermon at La Place in 1934 at the centennial celebration.  Her younger brother, John Thomas DeBardeleben, who was the daughter of John Finlay DaBardeleben and Sarah’s sister Mary, was admitted in full connection and ordained Deacon in 1915, and Elder in 1917.  He became a Chaplain, and is buried in Arlington.  So, Miss Dee’s family ties to Methodism were extremely strong!

I should mention that the La Place church was the first Methodist society established in Macon County, although it was at a different location and had a different name at its founding.

My wife, Betty Menefee Segrest, remembers Miss Dee saying that she cried when some of her cousins enrolled at what is now Huntingdon College, (which was located in Tuskegee back then) but she did not have the money to go. Putting that into historical perspective, at that time East Alabama Female College (now Huntingdon) was a Methodist school for girls, located in Tuskegee, and accepted undergraduate as well as college age students, so it is difficult to reconstruct the exact background information for this comment.

As we have seen in other essays, after her father’s death, Miss Dee completed high school in Montgomery in 1895, and enrolled at Alabama Normal School in Livingston in 1896, and then went on to the University of Alabama in 1898. It is not clear how and why all of this developed as it did, if she really wanted to go to the Methodist College in Tuskegee.

But in 1908, she would enroll in the Methodist Training School in Nashville, and most of the remainder of her career would be in affiliation with the Women’s Missionary Council of The Methodist Episcopal Church South.  In 1960, she was awarded life membership in the WSCS of the Alabama West Florida Conference of the Methodist Church.

As I have described in other essays, Mary Christine De Bardeleben felt a call to missionary work.  The call apparently came while she was teaching with Julia Tutwiler at Alabama Normal School in 1901-1902, after she had completed her work at the University of Alabama, and before she attended Teachers College, Columbia University in 1902-1903.  Initially, she felt that the call was to go to Japan as a Methodist missionary. At age 20, she was too young to qualify as a missionary.  At that point in time, the Methodist Training School had not yet been organized, and apparently it was some other agency that determined the she was too young.  After receiving a degree from Teachers College at Columbia, she returned to La Place, the place of her birth in rural Macon County, Alabama.  There, she taught all twelve grades in a one room school.  And on a Christmas Eve, a traumatic announcement by her Uncle who was managing the farm on which she was living that all Negroes on the place were intoxicated, she felt a call to mission work among Blacks in the south.

She was still persevering in her call to mission work.  The Methodist Training School was apparently organized in Nashville in 1906, under the auspices of the Women’s Missionary Council of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.  We will never know when she communicated her desire to do missionary work among Blacks in the South to the school.  Apparently, she had made this decision before her acceptance.  We will never know if such an iconoclastic idea delayed her admission to the training school.  Apparently, all we will ever know in this regard is what Katharine Tyson said in the Alabama Journal on January 6, 1960 after she interviewed Miss Dee.  It is my guess that the award of life membership in WSCS by the Alabama West Florida Conference on June 2, that same year was somehow related to the interview with Katharine Tyson.  In any event, both events occurred over 50 years after Miss Dee was admitted to the Methodist Training School in Nashville in 1908.  Unfortunately, the account by Tyson is not totally accurate.  She reported that after completing her work at the University of Alabama, Miss Dee “had further study at Columbia where she got a BS in education from Teachers College; and her Masters at Peabody, she returned to Shorter to teach in a one room school.”  Miss Dee actually finished at Columbia in 1903, and likely returned to Shorter to teach, but shedid not receive the degree from Peabody until 1921.  I have summarized the likely time table for the events above, and analyzed them carefully in an earlier essay in this series.

It is a credit to her perseverance that Miss Dee was eventually accepted for missionary training in 1908.  Ms. Tyson reported:

“All but one member of the faculty insisted that she train for the orient.  This one, a Field Work Supervisor, understood Miss De Bardeleben’s feelings about working in her own country, and assigned her to a Negro church to teach the Bible to women.  As the days went by, she became more enthralled with her project, and stood her ground about remaining in America to teach.”  No doubt, the one faculty member who supported Miss Dee’s plan was Miss Estelle Haskin, whom I discuss later.

So, Miss Dee began missionary training in 1908.  As always, she was an exceptional student. In 1926, while teaching in Norman Oklahoma, Miss Dee requested and received a transcript of her credits from Methodist Training School. I have not figured out the purpose of the request. By 1926, the Methodist Training School had merged into Scarritt College for Christion Workers.  The organization into which it merged began as Scarritt Bible and Training School in Kansas City Missouri in 1892.  That organization moved from Missouri to Nashville in 1924.  The letter transmitting the transcript to Miss Dee is from J. M. Sullen, Registrar of Scarritt College for Christian Workers. The letter was in Miss Dee’s box, together with a hand written transcript.

There were actually two hand written versions of the transcript, listing courses and grades. It is possible that one or both were copied from a more formal transcript which may have been delivered to someone for whatever purpose it was requested. The hand written documents indicate that Miss Dee’s courses in the Methodist Training School included Sociology, Christian Doctrine, Applied Methods, Home Conduct, Old Testament History, Prophets, Apostolic Age, Epistles, Church History, Public Speaking, Domestic Science, and Bible reading. She scored 90 or higher in all but two of the courses, and 88 ½ and 89 ½ on those two. The focus was clearly on knowledge of the Christian Religion and the Church. There is little other information about her actual work in the Training School, but Miss Dee obviously did quite well in the training school.

The box containing Miss Dee’s “stuff” that I examined included a picture of the Methodist Training School Class of 1910. Miss Dee is pictured as one of the students.

Miss Dee finished missionary training in Nashville in 1910. The treasures in Miss Dee’s box also included accounts of the deaths of two of the people whose pictures appear as faculty: Sara Estelle Haskin and Kate Hackney. The box included two larger copies of the picture of Miss Hackney. However, the picture for the class, and both copies of the picture that I found in the box all appear to be the same photograph. Miss Dee had written on the back of one of the pictures, “Kate Hackney many years missionary to China” and on the other, “Kate Hackney, missionary to China many years.”

The information in the box clearly indicated that Miss Dee stayed in touch with Estelle Haskin and Kate Hackney for as long as they lived. Miss Haskin died in 1940, and Miss Hackney in 1946.  The box included a personal letter from Miss Hackney’s sister, giving details about Miss Hackney’s death in 1946.  Like Miss Dee, she had attended Columbia, and additional information may justify a separate essay. Miss Dee’s relationship with Estelle Haskin definitely justifies its own essay in this series, which I will provide.

Miss Dee was intent on missionary work to Blacks in the south.  After she completed the training course in 1910, Miss Dee became a member of the faculty at the Methodist training school for the year 1910-1911.  She worked with Estelle Haskin on missionary work with Blacks in Nashville, while serving on the faculty.  I suspect that she was training for her own mission to Blacks, and awaiting official approval of that effort.  She finally got approval to engage in missionary work to Blacks in Augusta, Georgia, as reported by reporter Tyson in the 1960 Alabama Journal article.  In 1911, Miss Dee’s long-standing relationship with the Women’s Missionary Council of the Methodist Episcopal Church South began.  She was granted her wish for missionary work with Blacks in the south, and assigned to missionary work in Augusta Georgia.

No doubt the presence of Paine College in Augusta led to the decision to start the work there.  Not only did she establish a “settlement” house there—she also became a part of the faculty of Paine College, which appears to have had a significant impact on the development of her career.  Students and faculty at Paine College were instrumental, and a very necessary part of the plan that led to the establishment of what came to be known as the Bethlehem House.  The fact that the work was under the auspices of the Women’s Missionary Council provided a structure for her long-lasting relationship with Miss Estelle Haskin.

The Women’s Missionary Council of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MECS) chose Augusta Georgia for Miss Dee’s missionary work among the Blacks.  Clearly, that location was chosen because Paine College was located there.

Paine College had been founded in 1882 by the leadership of the MECS, one of the predecessors of the present-day United Methodist Church, and the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, which by name change is now the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Each denomination appointed three of the six-member board of trustees.  Paine College was the brainchild of Bishop Lucius Henry Holsey, who first expressed the idea for the College in 1869. Bishop Holsey asked leaders in the MECS to help establish a school to train Negro teachers and preachers so that they might in turn appropriately address the educational and spiritual needs of the people newly freed from the evils of slavery. Leaders in the ME Church South agreed, and Paine Institute came into being.  Paine was under the leadership of white presidents for many years.

It is interesting to note that the school was named in honor of Bishop Robert Paine, who had owned plantations in Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi.  He had played a role in the division of the Methodist Church on the issue of slavery in 1844.  It is also interesting that La Place Methodist Church in Macon County, where Miss Dee had joined at age eleven was also originally named Paine Chapel in honor of Bishop Paine, according to a talk that Miss Dee made at the La Place on the occasion of its centennial celebration in 1934.

The choice of Augusta, where Paine was located was quite natural, and the decision drew on actual experience. Miss Estelle Haskin, the faculty member who championed Miss Dee’s desire to become a missionary to Blacks, had established a somewhat similar mission to Blacks in Nashville in 1894.  Fisk University assisted in that effort.  And Miss Dee worked with that project in Nashville while attending and serving on the Methodist Training School and while awaiting her assignment to Augusta.

Miss Dee served on the faculty at Paine while working with students and faculty at Paine to establish the Bethlehem Center.  She taught English at Paine College.  She was chosen to lead the high school division at Paine. Teaching at Paine was her first experience on a College faculty, but would not be her last.  The teaching experience at Paine appears to have pointed her in the direction of teaching at the college level. In 1916, while still teaching at Paine, Miss Dee enrolled in the Master’s Degree program at Peabody College in Nashville in Summer School.  That training would be part of her preparation for teaching at Oklahoma University and Texas Tech.

Paine College has produced many notable alumni.  Among them are Mike Thurmond, superintendent Dekalb County School District, Louis Lomax, the first African American TV Journalist, Woodie W. White, a Bishop in the United Methodist Church, John Wesley Gilbert, archaeologist, educator, and Methodist missionary to the Congo, who was the first graduate of Paine College, the first African-American professor of the school, and the first African-American to receive an advanced degree from Brown University, Frank Yerby, a writer, Joseph Lowery, minister in the United Methodist Church and leader in the civil rights movement who founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference along with Martin Luther King Jr., Shirley McBay, a gifted mathematician, who served as dean for Student Affairs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1980 to 1990, and Emma Gresham, teacher and politician who was mayor of Keysville, Georgia..  These alumni demonstrate the contributions of Paine College.  Along with hundreds of other alumni, these had diverse gifts, and used them well.  Each of them can be found on an internet search.  Miss Dee made her contribution to the educational efforts of Paine College.

With regards to her personal efforts, perhaps the most poignant story of an alumnus is that of Charles G. Gomillion, who was to have a significant role in Macon County History, and his story deserves its own essay!