MARY LAVALETTE GILLIAM
The name "Lavalette" is frequently used by the Dupuy descendants. It origi-
nated from Susannah Lavillon, the wife of Bartholomew Dupuy. My sister, Mary
Lavalette (Martin) Cowart, and Aunt Mary's Daughter, Mary Lavalette (Dillon)
Wintzer bear this name in my generation, and Mary's daughter is Mary Lavalette
(Cowart) Jenkins.
Mary Lavalette Gilliam was born at Hixburg, Appomattox Co., Virginia, March 16,
1850. She was the daughter of Spencer and Mary Elizabeth Dupuy Gilliam. I don't
know anything about the childhood of my grandmother, but after seeing the lovely old
Gilliam home in which she grew up, it is easy to imagine the fun that she and her
brothers and sisters had out there in the country and the life of plenty that must
have been taken for granted. Then the Civil War came and changed all of that.
When Mary Lavalette was only eleven years old, Virginia seceded from the Union.
I have often thought of grandfather serving as a surgeon in the war, but the part
that this young girl in it did not occur to me. She must have seen the men in her
family leave for war. She must have seen the gracious living around her change to a
life of actual privation. As the Gilliam home is on the old road from Farmville to
Appomattox, they were near the battle scenes in which the Confederacy breathed its
last, and she must have watched the raggle-taggle, disheartened soldiers as they
went past the house on the dusty road. The poverty did not end for many, many years
after the war, in many cases for generations.
Mary Lavalette married Dr. Charles Silas Morton November 1, 1871. She was
twenty-one and he was thirty-nine. Although his home was only a mile from hers,
they must have seemed world apart - his age, education, and war experiences were in
sharp contrast to her youth and lack of education because of the war. She had prob-
ably never been far from the home in which she was born. Let Aunt Mary tell us
about her:
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M.M.D. Now, children of the 20th Centry, try to picture my mother, married
after a restricted life in the country, during and after the Civil War, to a
man 18 years her Senior. I can't recall her ever being anything but loving and
tender and respectful to my father. He was the same to her - very gentle, and
careful of her health and comfort. Each one tried to spare the other. Although
we were short on money, ours was a happy home, and we had a good and happy life
to look back on. When they first married, she lived with my father's parents
at Happy Valley, across the Appomattox from her home. That was not a happy
arrangement. She loved Grandma, but disliked Grandpa Bigelow. I think he made
her feel her lack of education. Her sisters went to a young ladies' seminary
at Charlotte Court House, but when she was the age to go to school, there was a
war on and the school was closed. She was a woman of intelligence and a very
strong character. When her first baby was coming, papa bought a house about a
mile from mama's old home. She used to tell me of how frightened she was at
night, especially when the wind moaned around the house. It was bare and cold.
Those were hard times.
Mary Lavalette and Charles then moved to Pamplin, Virginia. He practiced medi-
cine there, and they lived there until their children were grown. There were ten
children. James died in infancy, but they raised nine children to adulthood.
M.M. All of my life nothing has impressed and perhaps influenced me more than
the kindness and patience of my mother, and the strong family loyalties of the
people of their time. Not only did she raise nine children of her own, but her
husband's parents and two sisters shared her home for many years. Before I can
remember, she adopted and raised along with us Lacy W. Thornton, a son of her
dead sister, Virginia Frances. Grandma Gilliam adopted his brother, Lewis, and
the father kept the third, Floyd.
V.M.B. It is hard to believe that sixteen people ever lived in the Pamplin
house, as one sees it today.
Henry Morton: Mama was occupied with rearing a growing family, and trying
studiously to instill in us the great virtues of honesty and fear of God. I
recall one little instance personally. When quite young, some of the boys my
age told me about going into the livery stables where chickens frequented to
pick up the fallen grain, and thus made< their nests and laid their eggs. They
would take the eggs and sell them to the grocery stores. So I copied them, and
sold my eggs for candy, taking the same home. Mama, knowing how scarce even
pennies were, asked me where I got the candy. I told her what I had done. She
gave me a lecture on stealing and made me take the candy back to the store and
deliver the eggs to the woman who owned the chickens!
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V.M.B. My mother would have done exactly the same!
M.M.D. I can't seem to remember too much of a life as children, though in a way
that comes back clearer than my life at Indian Rock. One thing I recall vividly
is a mental picture of the family sitting around the fireplace in Mama's bed-
room. Suddenly, Eva squats down and cackles. My father, whom I adored, laughed
so heartily, and how jealous I was of Eva. I am so like my mother in many ways
but I did not inherit her delightful laugh. Although she was a lovely person,
she was too severe in her religious tenets, too aware of the Fear of God, too
ignorant, as the Protestant churches were in that time, of the Love of God. So
her anxiety about our salvation turned some of us away from the church for
awhile - searching. Elsie and Finlay became Christian Scientists. Her obituary
bears this out: "Perhaps her excellence was best seen in the home in which she
reared a large family in the Fear of God. The religious training of her chil-
dren was her delight. Faithfully she told them of God and Christ and right-
eousness. They now rise up and call her blessed."
My mother never seemed to have been bothered by having been raised in such a
pious atmosphere. I know that the love and affection that each of the Mortons felt
for each other shone through any religious restrictions that they had. Arry and my
sister Mary and I listened to Uncle Henry and Uncle John talk of their childhood
for hours one night in 1963, and I only regret that we did not have a tape recorder.
What a happy time they had as children. They both were most impressed with the
family time around the fire at night, when grandfather read to them, or, in his ab-
sence, they took turns reading. Uncle John told about so many tricks that they
played on Will, "Uncle Billy", that Arry wondered how he ever grew to maturity.
Some of the practical jokes were a little rough. I reminded Uncle Henry of the tale
Mother told about his being required to pick bugs off the potato vines. He grew
tired of that activity, put some gunpowder in the can with the potato bugs, and set
fire to them. They blew up in his face, singeing his hair and eyebrows. That might
account for his baldness now, if his other brothers hadn't had the same trait!
Mother also told me that when Aunt Mary was a girl, her voice would get very
loud when she was excited. Grandmother would quietly admonish her: "Modulate your
voice, Mary, modulate your voice." Mother would wait until Mary was in a group of
friends, and her voice would ring out. Then Mother would sidle up to her and whis-
per, "M your V, Mary, M your V."
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As a child in the then snowless South Georgia, I loved to hear Mother tell about
how they improvised sleds, including dish pans, and what fun they had in the snow.
Uncle John pointed out that although they speak of the poverty they were raised in,
he never thought of it as such. He said that they never wanted for the necessities
of life, and were certainly as well off as their neighbors.
Grandmother was a neighborly soul and often followed up grandfather's visits
to the sick by calling on them and taking them gifts from her kitchen. James H.
Franklin wrote about this in her obituary:
Into this life of helpfulness (to grandfather as a physician) Mrs. Morton
entered with sympathy and power. Many a fevered brow felt the touch of her hand.
She heard the cry of the needy, and she believed that "inasmuch as she had done it
unto the least of these, she did it unto Christ." Many of the colored people speak
of her affectionately as "Miss Lave."
Grandmother's loving care of the sick exposed her to tuberculosis, or "consump-
tion", as it was called in those days. She finally had to go to a sanitarium in
Asheville. Her letters from there were loving and spirited, and she seemed to have
received frequent visits from her children who lived at great distances for those
days.
Mary Lavalette Gilliam Morton died in Asheville, N.C., June 27, 1911. "The
world is more lonesome in those circles in which she moved. Hard by the Presby-
terian house of worship, which she helped to erect, her body lies buried by the
side of her husband."
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