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Mary Davies Masters

Birth
Montgomery County, Maryland, USA
Death
15 Jun 1845 (aged 87)
Flat Creek, Overton County, Tennessee, USA
Burial
Flat Creek, Overton County, Tennessee, USA Add to Map
Memorial ID
View Source
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See "The Maryland-Carolina Ancestry of Edgar Lee Masters," by Charles E. Burgess, THE GREAT LAKES REVIEW vol. 8, #2 and Vol. 9, #1(Fall 1982/Spring 1983), pp. 51-80.

The article appeared in Western Illinois Regional Studies, which can be found online transcribed here
https://archive.org/stream/westernillinoisr71west/westernillinoisr71west_djvu.txt

"Summarized by Oscar Eldridge:
'Hilary Masters was a kind old man and was agreeable to get along with. His wife was said to have been a high tempered woman." John S. Masters would have just entered his teens in 1814, presumably the year of Hillery's death. His account of the domestic discord passed down through Robert S. Masters to Riley Masters, who was ninety-two when I interviewed him in 1971: "They said 'my daddy's told me' that she [Mary] was awful mean to him [Hillery]. They didn't get along. She was just as mean to him as she could be and when he died she had him buried over there on the Graveyard Hill. . . . She didn't want to be buried by him. She told 'em never to take her over there, said she wanted to be buried up in the Masters graveyard, and they buried here there.""

The site of Hillery's burial, by the 1970s, was a tangle of overgrowth on a bluff on the Charles Allred farm, overlooking Flatt Creek. Descendants could recall no marker; the site had been farmed over, with some stones pushed into an earthen dam, according to several accounts.

Census data shows a female fifty to sixty years old in 1 830 in the John S. Masters household, and one eighty to ninety in 1840.^^ The former was probably a mismark, for Mary, assuming she married in 1 779 at about age twenty, would have been in her mid-eighties on June 15, 1845. This death date is recorded in the John S. Masters family Bible. Her burial place, with other Masterses who lived in Overton County in the early nineteenth century, is in an overgrown hillside plot on the Edd Long farm, reachable by a back road from the route to Mount Gilead Church. Riley Masters identified the site of Mary's grave as close to that of his grandmother, Barbara, where a marker was placed in 1967 by Riley and his brothers. An historian of neighborhood families, the Rev. Oscar Nolen, told me that Hillery's remains had been moved to the site after Mary's death. Iscar Eldridge's account is that "they dug into the grave and found that the coffin and body was decayed so badly that they filled the grave up and let him stay where he was."

(Contributed by Find A Grave contributor Ray)
-------------------------
See "The Maryland-Carolina Ancestry of Edgar Lee Masters," by Charles E. Burgess, THE GREAT LAKES REVIEW vol. 8, #2 and Vol. 9, #1(Fall 1982/Spring 1983), pp. 51-80.

The article appeared in Western Illinois Regional Studies, which can be found online transcribed here
https://archive.org/stream/westernillinoisr71west/westernillinoisr71west_djvu.txt

"Summarized by Oscar Eldridge:
'Hilary Masters was a kind old man and was agreeable to get along with. His wife was said to have been a high tempered woman." John S. Masters would have just entered his teens in 1814, presumably the year of Hillery's death. His account of the domestic discord passed down through Robert S. Masters to Riley Masters, who was ninety-two when I interviewed him in 1971: "They said 'my daddy's told me' that she [Mary] was awful mean to him [Hillery]. They didn't get along. She was just as mean to him as she could be and when he died she had him buried over there on the Graveyard Hill. . . . She didn't want to be buried by him. She told 'em never to take her over there, said she wanted to be buried up in the Masters graveyard, and they buried here there.""

The site of Hillery's burial, by the 1970s, was a tangle of overgrowth on a bluff on the Charles Allred farm, overlooking Flatt Creek. Descendants could recall no marker; the site had been farmed over, with some stones pushed into an earthen dam, according to several accounts.

Census data shows a female fifty to sixty years old in 1 830 in the John S. Masters household, and one eighty to ninety in 1840.^^ The former was probably a mismark, for Mary, assuming she married in 1 779 at about age twenty, would have been in her mid-eighties on June 15, 1845. This death date is recorded in the John S. Masters family Bible. Her burial place, with other Masterses who lived in Overton County in the early nineteenth century, is in an overgrown hillside plot on the Edd Long farm, reachable by a back road from the route to Mount Gilead Church. Riley Masters identified the site of Mary's grave as close to that of his grandmother, Barbara, where a marker was placed in 1967 by Riley and his brothers. An historian of neighborhood families, the Rev. Oscar Nolen, told me that Hillery's remains had been moved to the site after Mary's death. Iscar Eldridge's account is that "they dug into the grave and found that the coffin and body was decayed so badly that they filled the grave up and let him stay where he was."

(Contributed by Find A Grave contributor Ray)


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  • Maintained by: PJC
  • Originally Created by: PJC
  • Added: Oct 31, 2014
  • Find a Grave Memorial ID:
  • Find a Grave, database and images (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/138102580/mary-masters: accessed ), memorial page for Mary Davies Masters (Jan 1758–15 Jun 1845), Find a Grave Memorial ID 138102580, citing John S. Masters Cemetery, Flat Creek, Overton County, Tennessee, USA; Maintained by PJC (contributor 50185637).