In the photo, she’s on the far right — dressed in white, a soft cap on her head, hands folded on a park bench, seated between are my uncle Ronnie as a boy in a plaid shirt and my grandmother in a summer dress. Behind them, a wall of flowers, and behind that, the long dripping curtains of Spanish moss that could only mean one place: Florida.
This particular bench was at Silver Springs, just outside Ocala. It wasn’t a stop along the long drive down from just outside Asheville, North Carolina — that trip ended in High Springs, Florida, where my grandmother had resettled with Bud and the rest of the family. This was a day trip out, taken sometime during the visit, everyone piling into the car for an afternoon at the springs. For a few minutes, three generations sat still in the flowers long enough for a photograph. The woman on the right was Mary Elizabeth “Lizzie” Gantt — our great-grandmother.
Finding Her on the Record
I knew her long before I ever went looking for her on paper — and then, one day, there she was: a five-year-old girl on a census page. The 1900 Federal Census for Leicester Township, Buncombe County, North Carolina, lists a household headed by a day laborer named John — and there, among the children, is “Elizabeth,” age 2, born in February. It’s the earliest paper trace of the woman who would, six decades later, sit on that bench in Florida watching her grandchildren.
She was born February 18, 1895, in Buncombe County, the daughter of Rev. John Franklin Gantt and Margaret “Maggie” Smith Gantt. Her father was a minister and a lifelong fixture of the Buncombe County community — and faith ran deep on both sides of her family. When she married into the Parham family, she was marrying into another household full of preachers: her husband was the son of Rev. Samuel Parham, and his sister had married yet another minister. Lizzie herself carried that thread forward as a member of Victory Baptist Church for the rest of her life.
A Marriage, and a Family
On October 26, 1912, in Buncombe County, eighteen-year-old Lizzie married Jesse Alonzo “Lon” Parham, four years her senior. Together they raised five children in North Carolina: Frances, born 1914; Clarence Richmond “Bud,” born 1915, who would go on to fight in six major campaigns across Europe in World War II; Theodore Clyde, born 1919; Jessie Thedra, born 1924; and Mary Elizabeth, born around 1928.
It was Bud’s move to High Springs, Florida, that eventually pulled the rest of the family south for visits — trips like the one in this photograph, where a stop at Silver Springs became a chance to get everyone out of the car and into a garden for a minute.
The Grandmother Everyone Remembers
Family history gives you names, dates, census lines. It’s the people who give you the rest. My mother’s cousin Pam remembers Lizzie as a wonderful cook — the kind of grandmother whose kitchen you wanted to be in. And on those long drives down to Florida, Lizzie always came prepared: she loved having something to snack on for the ride. It’s a small detail, but it’s the kind that makes a name on a census page into an actual person — someone who got a little restless on a long car trip just like the rest of us, and packed accordingly.
Lizzie outlived Lon by more than a decade, passing away on May 17, 1985, at ninety years old, in an Asheville rest home. She’s buried beside him at Pisgah Memorial Park in Candler, North Carolina. By then, she had 16 grandchildren, 19 great-grandchildren, and four great-great-grandchildren — a family that, that day at Silver Springs, was still very much in the process of growing.
This is an ongoing series on “The Great Greats” — the people whose photographs I have, whose stories I’m still piecing together.