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 Mary Webb Quinn Mary Webb was born in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. She was one of nine surviving children of sharecropping parents, and she remembered a happy childhood focused on hard work on the farm. Like most farmers in the South Carolina piedmont, the Webbs grew cotton for the market and produced most of their own food as well. The years between the two world wars were difficult ones for Spartanburg area farmers. The average value of a Spartanburg County farm fell nearly 50 percent between 1920 and 1930, and nearly 70 percent of its farmers were tenants like the Webb family. In spite of hard times on the farm, Spartanburg County enjoyed a mixed agricultural economy that allowed many rural residents to supplement their incomes with jobs in local textile mills throughout the 1920s. Nonetheless, the Great Depression brought more hard times and reduced employment even in the textile mills. Mrs. Quinn remembered the financial struggles of her childhood, but her most vivid memories were of good times with her family. Mary Webb Quinn’s parents valued education and encouraged her to attend college, providing whatever financial support they could. Working in a shirt factory, Mrs. Webb managed to put herself through Textile Institute [later Spartanburg Methodist College], a two-year college in Spartanburg that offered students the opportunity to combine study with work. After she finished her two-year program, Mary Webb worked for a year to save money toward the rest of her college education. She received a scholarship and a work-study job at Winthrop University, which was then the state-supported women’s college in Rock Hill, South Carolina. At Winthrop, she majored in home economics, and after graduation she began to teach school in Chester County. Although Mrs. Quinn’s husband, Eldred, grew up on a nearby farm, the two never met growing up. They, did, however, share relatives by marriage; Mary’s aunt had married Eldred’s uncle. After high school, Eldred sharecropped for a while and then went to work in a textile mill, working his way up to the skilled position of weaver. Later he worked in a shipyard in Charleston . After Pearl Harbor was bombed, Eldred enlisted in the navy and served 150 Country Women Cope with Hard Times in north Africa, participating in the invasion at Casablanca. While there, his parents wrote to tell him that the Webb family, including several single daughters, had moved in next door. During World War II, writing letters to the “boys overseas” was considered a patriotic act, and young women often corresponded with soldiers whom they had never met. Soon Mary Webb began to write to Eldred Quinn, and they continued to correspond as he moved into the European theater. When Eldred Quinn returned home on leave in November 1944, the two met and became better acquainted. They continued to correspond, and they married two years after the war ended. Mary Quinn taught school for several years after their marriage, while Eldred used his GI Bill educational benefits to earn an agricultural engineering degree at Clemson University. Then Eldred took a job in Alabama with Massey-Ferguson Tractor Company, setting up tractor dealerships in the southeast. Mrs. Webb taught school in Alabama and later in Atlanta when Eldred took a job with Case Tractor Company there. During these years, the Quinns had a daughter, Sheila, and a son, William. In the mid 1960s, Eldred Quinn decided to leave the tractor distribution business because the travel was taking him away from his family too much. He entered public school teaching, and the couple moved home to Spartanburg County where they both took teaching jobs at Boiling Springs High School. They retired in 1986 and now devote their time to caring for their garden and spending time with their five grandchildren. I interviewed Mrs. Quinn and her husband in their brick 1960s ranch home on land near the farms where they grew up in northern Spartanburg County, South Carolina. We spoke on October 18, 2000. Ever the hospitable homemaker, Mrs. Quinn served me a snack of homemade bread and jelly and sent me home with a small jar of her own preserves. In the summer of 2001, the Quinns corrected the interview transcript. I have included Mrs. Quinn’s portion of the oral interview here, but the combined interview is available in the Kennedy Local History Room of the Spartanburg County Public Library.  I’ll go first [before her husband] because he talks...

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