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Dear Nora: 

 

A letter from Rebecca March, enclosing a card from Mamie Matthews, reached me this morning, and I am hastening to reply in order that you may have the desired information concerning my great aunt, Mary Sharp.

 

Aunt Mary was a Miss Corn, a sister of my grandmother [Laodicea].  She married my grandfather's brother, James Sharp.  When Uncle James died my Aunt Mary freed eighty Negroes and paid their way to Liberia, Africa, that colony having been recently established for American slaves of the Negro race who were liberated by their masters.  Later, she gave the bequest out of which, as a nucleus, the Mary Sharp College grew, again evincing her profound belief in freedom--this time, not of the body but of the mind.  Not of the body of slaves--but of the minds of women.

 

My earliest recollections of home are mingled with memories of Aunt Mary, tiny, blind and carefully dressed in black silk, with soft lace fichu and cap.  She died poor, in my mother's home, in 1864, the war having swept away the remainder of her fortune.  My father passed on the year before.

 

Aunt Mary never had any children, but she reared my father, his brother and sisters.  She adopted Aunt Sue, my father's baby sister, who later graduated at Mary Sharp College, and taught Latin there before the civil war.

 

A large monument marks the grave of Uncle James and Aunt Mary, at the old homestead of the Sharps, a few miles from Winchester.  A part of this stone had blown down when I visited the graves four years ago.

 

Any of the Estill family at Winchester, Miss Beulah Wallace or Henry might visit the grave for a look at the monument, and supply information which I may have forgotten.

 

Love to 'The Girls.'

 

Affectionately,

Mrs. Mary Sharp Mullins

 

Austin, Texas, December 8, 1925."