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Excerpt from Oral History Interview with Mary Price Adamson, April 19, 1976. Interview G-0001. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) See Entire Interview >>

Death of Adamson's father and the move to Chapel Hill

Following her father's death, Adamson's mother moved the family to Chapel Hill. While there, her mother resumed her education, taking courses from her cousin Eugene Branson, former president of the State Normal School of Georgia and founder and head of the Department of Rural Social Economics at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Citing this Excerpt

Oral History Interview with Mary Price Adamson, April 19, 1976. Interview G-0001. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Full Text of the Excerpt

MARY FREDERICKSON:
Did your mother ever participate in any of the women's club movements?
MARY PRICE ADAMSON:
Oh, there was Madison was five miles away, and out in the country there was nothing to do. We even had to go to Madison to go to a Presbyterian church, five miles away, and we didn't go very much, even though my parents were quite religous, because it was too much to get all of the children up and washed and dressed and get them off to the five miles to go to Sunday school or church. So there wasn't any opportunity for her to do that. She was quite interested in learning and knowing about things. She had a cousin whose name was Eugene Branson, who was a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Now you would call him a sociologist, but his specialty was on the rural conditions in the South. He was quite an accepted scholar and professor, so that when we moved to Chapel Hill, my mother thought that what she would like to do would be to goto the university since she had had only two years of college. She decided she would take one of Cousin Eugene's classes. She and my father had always been very stern with the children about studying and making good grades. We were supposed to apply ourselves in school. So, she had no alternative but to study hard and because she had the double things-she had to meet Cousin Eugene's criteria because he had been a tutor in her home when she was a child, and Miss Mary Trotter had also been a tutor. Miss Mary Trotter-I was named for her- had lived in my mother's home because there was no school for them to go to. When she went to Chapel Hill, she did take the sociology courses and my, my, she worked hard. Whether Cousin Eugene may have given her preference in grades, I don't know. (Laughter)
MARY FREDERICKSON:
Did she take courses for several years?
MARY PRICE ADAMSON:
Yes, I think it was for at least two years, and perhaps she took only one course a year.But she found it enormously interesting. She was a person who liked to read, and she liked to find out about things. She had a good, curious mind, about such things as new kinds of foods. She did not feel that she had to have just the kind of food that she was brought up with. She read the magazines. I remember her winning a prize from Woman's Home Companion, or some magazine, about a cake. She chose a name for it that she called "Royal Tropic Aroma Cake." (Laughter)
MARY FREDERICKSON:
Was she ever interested in politics?
MARY PRICE ADAMSON:
I don't know. It would not have been appropriate.