Mary Etta was the second-oldest daughter of Reuben A Lindsey & Sarah E Beasley of Cowee TWP Macon County, NC, born in 1866 according to early census's, she was a twin to James Albert "Jim" Lindsey; her brother was very tall and Mary was very petite and beautiful with jet black hair and a voluptuous figure. They were the 2nd & 3rd of six known children in a large Lindsey family with several sets of twins. Their father Reuben (right in the picture) became known as a "singing teacher", he moved his young family out of Macon County to work on the Cherokee Reservation while Mary was a child, and in her old age Mary showed children in Spartanburg how to do an Indian dance & told them her father used to manage the store on the reservation where she played with Indian children; her daughter Pearl also verified her mother knew some Native herbal medicines.

Mary was reddish-skinned & black haired; her grandmother Jenny Hibbard-Beasley, known later as Jane, was the daughter of Julia/Jailey Stiles - Hibbard. (Ja-ha-li-ah is a Cherokee first name and the Hibbard's were one of the earliest listed trading families who lived in the Cowee Mts when this was Cherokee land, they may have intermarried with the Cherokee in the 1700's so I wonder if her husband who died young was possibly part Cherokee and called her by a Cherokee first name, though most early white-origin records tend to list her as Julia. One of her possible relatives Isaac Hibbard was listed on part of the Trail of Tears in 1938.)

Mary Lindsey was not intellectually bright, unlike her brother Jim she never attended school and could not read or write, she was also never able to cook or sew according to youngest daughter Pearl who said she took care of her mother for many years until she died. As far as I have been able to find, Mary never worked a paying job, after her husband died when she was about 42 yrs old Mary alternated living with different children at different times.

In talking to relatives, Mary's brother's great-great-grandson Richard Gosnell said he was told by Mary's nephew Robert Russell son of Harriet Lindsey-Russell that his mother said that Mary & Harriet lost their mother in 1882 when she was about 39 yrs old. (We cannot find a record of it.) Mary's mother Sarah was working in a field at Hannah's Spring in Madison County where they were living at the time when she felt ill, Sarah bathed in the spring to cool off but was still not feeling good, she went home & laid down on the bed where she was soon found dead by her children. She was buried somewhere close to where she died, but no one now knows exactly where, only that it was near Hannah's Spring; she probably had no marker. Mary's father Reuben is said to have totally abandoned his children after his wife died, he is quoted by Robert as having told them: "You can leave, or you can drop dead, I don't care which." The six Lindsey children, aged 18 to 4, walked on foot all the way back to Cowee Mt in Macon County alone to their grandparents'.

Reuben Lindsey evidently stayed in Madison County and married Ellender Shelton Gillespie three years later on 7 Nov 1885 in Madison County, NC; Ellender, called "Sade", was the volatile mother of Lavada Jane Shelton who had married Josiah Jacob Campbell Rinehart called "Camel" who was an older son of John Rinehart, Mary's future husband. Sade had a son born in 1882 who later said his father was Reuben Lindsey, this could be true if Reuben was having an affair with Sade at the time his wife died, Sade told a censustaker in 1910 that she'd had ten children, I only know of five by three (or four) different fathers.

In Aug 1886, Mary Lindsey had her first child, a son she named after her brother, James Albert; I was told by Dewey Foster, a former Sheriff of Madison County & a cousin, that Jim's father was known to be Elmo Bradley, a local man in Madison County, if so then Mary came back to Madison County by Nov 1885 when her father got married the 2nd time to Sade. Her brother Jim Lindsey was hired to work on John Rinehart's farm in Meadow Fork about the same time, according to Richard Gosnell, and that's how Jim met and fell in love with John's daughter Malinda Leanna Cordelia Rinehart & married Cordie on 27 Nov 1887 in Madison County. (If anyone looks up this marriage on Ancestry, it will erroneously list the marriage county as Craven County; I have told Ancestry of this mistake in their computer for several years now but they have done nothing to correct it. The page clearly says "Madison County Marriages" at the top, and all the marriages on that page and on others nearby are mistakenly entered into the Ancestry computer as being in Craven County.)

The Lindsey children had been members of their mother's new church in Cowee TWP, Liberty Baptist Church, and also members of Cowee Baptist prior to Liberty Baptist being built, and several of them moved their memberships to Meadow Fork Baptist Church where Jane Rinehart attended. (Jane's husband John Rinehart was not a member of any church that I know of, nor were most of their sons.)

Somewhere around this time, Mary became involved with John Rinehart, he was married & in his 50's and Mary was about 20. By this time John had been living in Madison County since about 1857 and had become a father of at least 12 children, a successful farmer and a merchant owning at least four general stores in Madison County according to his grandson Dewey Foster, and he had married Jane Duckett, a local daughter of landowner Jacob Duckett of Meadow Fork in 1858 and Jacob had given them a productive farm, so they had over 30 yrs together in the community though John had a reputation as a very stingy man & not a churchgoer. John & Mary had their 1st child, Samantha Loretta Rinehart, about Jan 1889 in Cocke County, TN at a little place called "Nigger Branch", according to Richard Gosnell, it was near Del Rio, TN. When they left Madison County & how long they stayed in Cocke County I don't know. Then they had a set of twins Melvin and Elminor "Mina" in 1892.

In Aug 1894, John married Mary Lindsey in Cocke County, TN; he still had a 1st wife living & dependent children in Madison County, so he must have obtained a divorce in Tennessee (those records are not online yet, I'm told they're in county courthouses listed as just regular court proceedings, the state said they had no separate state database for divorces). Betty Rhinehart - Atkins told me that her father Hobart, a grandson of John & Jane who was raised for a while by his grandmother Jane Duckett-Rinehart, told her that his grandfather at this time had two wives at the same time, "one on each side of the mountain". (She said Hobart did not think very much of his grandfather & like most of his descendants talked rarely about him.)

In 1894, there was a lot going on legally in the lives of John & his 1st wife Jane besides the divorce and remarriage. 2 Gudger brothers, lawyers from Asheville, had applied to gain possession of the Duckett land that John had stopped paying taxes on when he left Jane. John & Jane & several of their children lost their homes, according to Dewey Foster, which John had partitioned out as individual farms to his adult children before he left their mother. Dewey said several of his children paid their taxes & therefore kept their land. The area was still being called "the Duckett farm" into the 1970's.

At some time in the 1890's, John brought his growing new family with Mary down to the textile mills of Spartanburg County, SC & put his older children to work in the mills which is what many poor families from the mountains were doing, I have read details of the families in a book written in 1915 that the majority of textile workers coming down from the mountains to work in Spartanburg County mills at this time were from Madison County NC. John took the money they earned and placed it in the Converse Bank and traveled back to Madison County & bought one parcel of land, then returned around 1900 & put his new family to work again, going back & buying another parcel of land in Madison County a few years later. He was in Madison County in early October 1908 when he had a stroke while building a barn, rumor says he was stung by a swarm of bees while riding to a store for nails. John lingered on for several weeks, Dewey Foster said he remembered his mother Sarah taking him to see her father on his deathbed, he had light blue eyes & sandy-colored hair turning white. Richard Gosnell said he was told that John asked to see his 1st wife Jane near the end, but Mary either didn't understand or did not comply, he asked her several times but she never sent for his 1st wife, and John died cursing Mary. Jane Rinehart later said that if she had known he had asked for her, she would have come. Jane survived him by another 10 yrs.

They buried John Rinehart at Meadow Fork Baptist Church on the right edge of the cemetery, which goes up the mountainside behind the pretty little church which sits in the middle of the "Y" of 2 roads. At the time he was buried, John's grave was at the top of the cemetery but since then many more graves have been added above him; his son Campbell is buried on the next row directly above him. My grandfather Eddie showed me where his father is buried, he said he remembered the funeral, he was 12 yrs old and had been working in the mills all his young life, his father never sent him to school, though he later attended night school at the mill. Despite having had 20 known children, John Rinehart has no stone there.

Just before John died around age 70, Mary's father Reuben acted as broker & sold John's two parcels of land to Dewey Foster's father, William Forrester, who had married John's daughter Sarah Ann Presley or Presnell (the family used both pronunciations of both names at that time), and Reuben turned the money over to Mary. Mary went back to Spartanburg on the train where she soon donated all the money to a preacher raising money for a new church. Her children were said to be rightly furious, especially Melvin the oldest son of John and Mary who was about 17, as it was money they had earned working hard for years in the mills, and Melvin went to the church & demanded they give the money back, but they refused. He took back the family bible on the podium that his mother had also donated. The Mary Rinehart family were now destitute.

(At this time, Mary's oldest son Jim also left home with a grandson of John Rinehart/son of Joe Rinehart named Arthur Rinehart, and both went west and joined the Army, so I wonder if Mary's giving away all the earnings the children had worked for all those years in the textile mills angered Jim just as much as it did Melvin.)

On the 1910 census, two yrs after her husband died, Mary is listed living in Whitney Mill Village near Spartanburg with her son Eddie listed as 14 & working as a "spinner" at the mill, her two youngest children, son Dewey & daughter Pearl, were with them. Eddie was the only one working. Her oldest daughter Samantha had married one year earlier & was living next door working in the mill as a "folder" with her husband of one year John Prather who was a "sweeper". Her son Melvin was living with the Forrester's in Meadow Fork Creek (he had left her in anger and disgust after she gave away all their money); her daughter Mina was recently married to Sam Ledford & living on College St in the Spartan Mill Village in Spartanburg; her son Dow was living with her brother Jim Lindsey in Inman Mills & working as a "dolpher" at the Inman mill. Her oldest son Jim was in the Army in 1910, stationed at Fort Logan, Arapahoe, Colorado. (I have been told that Jim used to regale locals in Spartanburg years later with tales that he served on the border with Mexico and frequently responded to raids by the Mexican bandit Pancho Villa on local landowners on the US side, I have found no evidence of this, in fact his time in the Army seems to have been mostly spent in a hospital where he was discharged with "Excellent Standing" in Jan 1911., he later served in "the Great War" in France in 1918.)

Mary lost her husband and three of her children before she died, one son Jasper died as an infant before 1900, and there's another gap between the children's births so she may have had two young children to die. I know she had at least nine children, seven of whom survived to adulthood. Her oldest daughter Samantha died in 1913 of pellagra, a disease of malnutrition which was pandemic in this area at this time caused by lack of niacin in the diet (lack of meat). Her youngest son Dewey Rinehart died in 1918 at the age of 16 from a gunshot wound, he was playing with a gun and a neighboring boy was taken into custody, but later released after Dewey told police it was an accident before he died.

From 1910 to her death in 1936, Mary lived with different children in & around Spartanburg, SC. In 1913 she was on College Street in Spartan Mills & in 1920 she was on Oliver St, in 1926 she was living on Williams St in Beaumont Mills, in 1929 she was on Dickson St. In 1930 she was living with her daughter Elminor "Mina" & her 2nd husband Tom Bruce on Evans St. When Mary died from double pneumonia in 1936, she was living at the home of her son Dow in Cedar Springs south of town.

Mary's monument lists her birth year as 1867, but all the early records & her twin brother Jim's records say 1866.

(based on many interviews with family members conducted over a lifetime by James Richard Gosnell and myself; census's between 1870 & 1930; Hill's Spartanburg City Directory's)

--Jennie Rhinehart, great-granddaughter updated 24 Feb 2022