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.
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