About Lucy Marks

Mary Garland Marks (May 8, 1788 - 1864)

The daughter of Lucy Meriwether Lewis Marks and John Marks, Mary Garland was born in the Broad River community, Wilkes County, Georgia. She was only three years old when her father died and shortly thereafter her mother and two brothers returned to “Locust Hill” in Albemarle County. Family stories indicate that she was a “great pet” of her oldest brother, Meriwether Lewis. Mary married Major William Harvie Moore (1787-1866) “a man of fortune” in 1808. (Gilmer, p. 84) He was the son of John Moore, Jr., and Mary Harvie Moore and the adopted son of his aunt, Mrs. Davenport. Mary Garland Marks and William Harvie Moore had twelve children and at some point, moved to Coosa County, Alabama, where they were living when they died.

Mary Garland Marks Moore’s granddaughter, Effie Moore Calhoun, wrote the following account in June, 1934:

“My grandmother was married at “Locust Hill” and went directly to her plantation in Georgia, which she inherited from her father, and began housekeeping in the house in which she was born. When her father died she was five [sic] years old and her father and his friend, Mr. John Moore, the father of William Moore, betrothed the two little children, boy and girl – Mary Garland Marks and William Moore – in the old English fashion because their plantations adjoined. My grandmother said she never thought of marrying any one else, and when my grandfather was twenty-one he came to Virginia to see her and they were married the next spring. They lived happily together for sixty years. They had twelve children, raised seven sons and two daughters; and I can say with pardonable pride that in whatever community they lived these seven sons were loved and respected by all, both rich and poor.”
(Anderson, p. 185)

 

 
Patricia Zontine, April 2009