Says Mrs. Myrta Lockett Avary, "True to her past, the South is not living in it. A wonderful future is before her. She is richer than the whole United States at the beginning of the War of Secession. She is the land of balm and bloom and bird songs, of the hand and the open door." In the aggregation of this spirit of hopefulness, courage and progressiveness of the New South the women have indeed been a powerful influence.
SARAH C. ACHESON.
Mrs. Sarah C. Acheson, public-spirited woman of Texas, should be remembered as gratefully by that state as are her ancestors by the nation at large. She was descended on the paternal side from English and Dutch families, who settled in Virginia, 1600, and on the maternal side from Colonel George Morgan, who had charge of Indian affairs under Washington with headquarters at Fort Pitt, and of whom Jefferson in a letter still in possession of the family says, "He first gave me notice of the mad project of that day"—meaning the Aaron Burr treason. Among Mrs. Acheson's ancestors should be mentioned Colonel William Duane, of Philadelphia, editor of the Philadelphia "Aurora" during the Revolution. Mrs. Acheson's girlhood was spent in Washington, Pennsylvania, where she was born February 20, 1844. And there, in 1863, she was married to Captain Acheson, then on General Myer's staff, the marriage taking place when the captain was on furlough with a gunshot wound in the face. He left for the front ten days after, encouraged by his young wife. Doctor and Mrs. Acheson moved to Texas in 1872, and during their residence there Mrs. Acheson has been a moral force, her influence being strongly felt, not only in the city where she resides, but throughout the state. Texas with all the blows which have come to its welfare is a place to bring out heroic deed. Mrs. Acheson has displayed spirit of a kind that the world seldom sees. When a cyclone struck the village of Savoy many of its inhabitants were badly wounded, some were killed, others made homeless. But Mrs. Acheson reached them as speedily as train could take her and she acted as nurse and as special provider for the suffering. She gave three years of active service to the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and she was state president at a time when a strong leader was greatly needed to guide their bark into a haven of financial safety. The world's progress in social, scientific and religious reform is not only an open but a well-read book to her, and in the evening of her long active life she has become an ardent worker for woman's suffrage.
MARY B. POPPENHEIM.
Miss Mary B. Poppenheim was born in Charleston, S. C, of South Carolina ancestry for six generations on both sides, her forebears having migrated to South Carolina from Bavaria and Ireland prior to the American Revolution.
