Country Women Cope with Hard Times: A Collection of Oral Histories

ONE: Elizabeth Fox McMahan

Elizabeth Fox McMahan The following narrative is the only one in this collection that did not begin as an oral history interview. I met Elizabeth McMahan Adamitis serendipitously. Mrs. Adamitis’s mother, Elizabeth Fox McMahan, attended Converse College, where I teach. In 2001, Mrs. Adamitis made a gift to Converse in memory of her mother, marking the hundredth anniversary of her mother’s graduation. With the donation, she included a marvelous four-page letter describing her mother’s life on a farm in Sevier County, Tennessee. Bobbie Daniel, the alumnae information director at Converse, read the letter and recalled that I had done research in Sevier County, Tennessee. She pointed this out to Alumnae Director Melissa Daves Jolley, who passed along a copy of Mrs. Adamitis’s letter to me. I was fascinated with her mother’s story, and I immediately wrote to Mrs. Adamitis to ask if I could come see her the next time I was visiting my parents in east Tennessee. Mrs. Adamitis agreed. On August 16, 2001, I visited with Mrs. Adamitis. I met her at her apartment , which was located on a secondary road just off the main tourist artery that connects Pigeon Forge and Sevierville. These towns are now booming tourist meccas, rather than the sleepy agricultural villages of Mrs. Adamitis ’s childhood. At eighty, Mrs. Adamitis was still lively and spry. She had strawberry blonde hair and wore glasses with large attractive frames. Her vitality and energy were striking. She devoted the entire day to driving me around Sevier County, showing me the sites where her mother had lived and worked. Along the way she provided me with details of her mother’s hard life on the farm. She also gave me copies of family photos and a copy of her own handwritten memoir of her mother. I frantically took notes and taped the conversation, but I quickly discovered that Mrs. Adamitis’s memoir was far more articulate, poignant, and detailed than any transcribed oral history interview could be. With Mrs. Adamitis’s permission, I have included her story here. This version comprises several letters that Mrs. Adamitis sent to Converse’s Alumnae Office and to me, as well as the handwritten memoir. In places, I have reorganized material in order to put similar 2 Country Women Cope with Hard Times Elizabeth Fox upon her graduation from Converse College in 1901. Photograph courtesy of Elizabeth McMahan Adamitis. information together. I have added explanatory information in brackets or in footnotes. I eliminated small amounts of extraneous material. I have added some punctuation for clarity, bracketed some additional explanatory words, and spelled out abbreviations, but otherwise I have left Mrs. Adamitis’s language and spelling intact. In June 2002, I asked her to read my edited version and make additions or corrections, which she and her sister, Ernestine McMahan Steele, did. Elizabeth Fox was born October 1, 1879. Her parents were farmers in rural Sevier County. Elizabeth attended Converse College on scholarship, graduating in 1901. Elizabeth Fox’s father was already blind from retinitis pigmentosa and probably glaucoma. During her senior year in college, he died. Fox’s mother was left with five small children to raise. Fox returned to Sevier County and began teaching school to help her mother make ends meet. In 1903, she married Ernest McMahan, son of a wealthy Sevier County landowner. The marriage was not a happy one, and Elizabeth Fox McMahan found herself burdened with a husband who was not interested in the day-to-day operation of the farm and with a large debt. She had three children early in the marriage and two more children in middle age. Elizabeth Fox McMahan 3 Elizabeth McMahan Adamitis, her daughter and fourth child, was born in 1921. After graduating from the University of Tennessee, the younger Elizabeth attended graduate training in occupational therapy at the University of Pennsylvania and went to work for the United States Army. She spent her career working as an occupational therapist in army and Veterans’ Administration hospitals, retiring in 1988. She was married for thirteen years to a man who turned out to be an alcoholic. After her divorce, she devoted herself to her work and to caring for her aging mother. She also had a lively social life, engaging in regular ballroom dancing. She remains active today, working out at the local gym three days a week and attending the meetings...