Mary Elizabeth “Belle” Bellamy was born on Friday, November 27, 1840, most likely in the home of her grandmother, Mary Priscilla Jennings Harriss, as John D. and Eliza were living with Eliza’s mother near the corners of Second and Dock Streets at that time. Not much is known about Belle’s childhood. She attended the South Carolina Female Collegiate Institute, known commonly as Barhamville Academy, near Columbia in the late 1850s. Students at Barhamville had a set curriculum for each year, so Belle studied algebra, ancient geography, botany, ancient history, mineralogy, and composition in her first year. Subsequent years included rhetoric, chemistry, U.S. government, astronomy, natural philosophy, belles lettres, and mathematics and other subjects, so if Belle did finish her studies she was a keenly educated woman by the time her family fled for Robeson County in 1862. A letter to Belle from her mother in 1865 illustrates that Belle was instrumental in helping with her younger brothers and sisters as their Ma and Pa got the mansion back in order after the Civil War. In the letter, Eliza Bellamy instructed her daughter to keep up with the family’s supplies of food and wood, keep her siblings out of sun, to be careful of fire, to make sure “Georgy” behaved himself and that Ellen kept “Robbie’s” curl tied up and out of his eye. After the War, John D. Bellamy put the mansion at 503 Market Street in Belle’s name—according to the deed she paid one dollar for the property—and the 1870 census showed the value of Belle’s property and personal estate totaling almost 15 times that of her father. Belle and W.J. Duffie of Columbia, South Carolina, were married on September 6, 1876, in the Bellamy mansion. Belle’s husband was more than a decade her senior and owned a successful publishing company and book business. W.J. Duffie was also a widower, and Belle became stepmother to his eight children who ranged in age from a three-year-old up to an eighteen-year-old. Belle and W.J. had two children, Eliza (Elise) Bellamy Duffie (Verner) was born on December 3, 1878 and Ellen Douglas Duffie (Taylor) was born on October 31, 1880. Belle, who seems to have gone by “Mary” as an adult, was a devout member of the First Presbyterian Church in Columbia. According to Belle’s obituary, she had been sick for a prolonged period of time before coming to Wilmington in the latter part of 1899 to seek medical help from her brother, Dr. W.J.H. “Willie” Bellamy. Her husband and daughters joined her in Wilmington at the beginning of December 1899, and soon after Willie diagnosed her with an “incurable …malady” and attempted to make her comfortable. She passed away on the afternoon of Sunday, January 7, 1900 in her parents’ home where funeral services were held just two days later. Mary Elizabeth “Belle” Bellamy was sixty years old at the time of her death and was initially interred at Oakdale Cemetery in Wilmington. On March 28, 1908, Mary Elizabeth's family had her body exhumed and reinterred at the First Presbyterian Churchyard in Columbia, South Carolina, where she was laid to rest beside her husband who passed away in 1901.