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One Southern Belle Who Was NoSouthern womanhood is badly served by the media. Too often the popular image of a Southern belle swings between a pale, protected flower and a sexy “ding-dong, yaw’l ” No wonder Scarlett O’Hara wonhundreds of fans. She had beauty and brains and backbone.And real-life heroines abound for girls growing up in the South. There was Sally Tompkins, the “steel magnolia” who ran her own hospital in Richmond during the Civil War and was commissioned a captain in the Confederate Army. There was Mary Draper Ingles’ incredible 40-day flight to freedom from Indian captivity in 1755 and Alice Proctor’s single-handed standoff of an Indian attack along the James River in 1622.Virginia history is lined with true heroines plus a few colorful characters like Sarah Harrison Blair, our first feminist and later alcoholic, of whom an old record reports “When Mr. James Blair was married to Mrs. Sarah Harrison ... when she was to say, ’Obey,* She said ‘No obey,* upon which He (the minister) refused to proceed the second time she said ‘No Obey' then he refused again to proceed. The third time she said ‘No Obey,’ the sd. Mr, Smith went on with the rest of theceremony.”Jacquelyn Meadors of New Market has added to my list another Southern belle who was no ding-dong. Meadors’ grandmother Zula Brown Toole of Georgia took on male naysayers to publish the first newspaper in her county and in the state of Georgia. Her “Miller County Liberal” also may have been the first published and edited by a female in the nation, according to “The Last Linotype” by Millard Grimes in 1985.RemembrancesBy Nancy Bondurant JonesOne hundred years ago this week,Toole’s first issue carried the date Sept. 1, 1897, and began weekly accounts of “good churches, good schools, good people,” said Meadors. “She refused to print sensational news, gossip, or advertise anything which would be harmful, thus no alcohol or tobacco. She ran the ‘Liberal’ until 1933 — back when ‘liberal’ meant looking at both sides, not the connotation today. The paper is still being published by a grandson (Terry Toole) today,” Meadors added.Born in Decatur, Ga., in 1863, Toole graduated from Troy State Teachers College in Alabama to begin her 40-year teaching career in Miller County. She also served the rural area as postmistress 1893-98. Probably the hunger for news apparent in congregations of neighbors at the post office prompted her next endeavor. In those days before automobiles and telephones to connect rural families, communication was word of mouth — and miseommunication common. Toole realized the need for a county newspaper and she determined to start one.Stated determination, however, was not enough. State law required a franchise that took 500 signatures to obtain. The very proper Southern lady, in long skirts, pedalled her bicycle around the back roads and byways with petition and pen to acquire signatures. She got the needed names of future subscribers, bought a flatbed Washington hand press plus otherequipment, and Miller County got its newspaper.Meadors pointed out the irony that her grandmother was writing editorials telling men how to vote long before she could vote herself. Always the epitome of femininity in long dresses, “She hated pants,” said Meadors, but she filled in whatever job was needed — writing, running the linotype when there was no operator on board, soliciting ads. And she always called things as she saw them. At the Olympics in Atlanta in 1996, a play about folk life called “Swamp Gravy: Special Edition” was performed as part of the Cultural Olympiad, The play depicted Toole’s life and the lives of other people from Southwest Georgia. One incident recalled how a lawyer who objected to a print commentcalled it “a-lie.” Her brothercame to her defense.“The lawyer wore this long-tail coat. Uncle Julian caught him up on the square there on the sidewalk; and when Uncle Julian got to him, he ran. and Uncle Julian got that knife and lunged it in the back of that coat. They say the tail of that coat, a Chesterfield that the lawyer wore, was going wide open as he ran away. Now that lawyer never called Miss Zula a liar again for something she published in the Liberal,” said her son-in-law Ben Priest.“Not a woman's libber,” recalled Meadors, “she believed women were equal but the home was the highest calling. She raised three children, her oldest Ona was my mother.” Meadors got to see “Swamp Gravy” when it was performed last Nov. 22 at the Kennedy Center in Washington. “It was such a thrill to see grandmother as a young girl,” she said. “She lived with us when I was a teen-ager and she wasZula Brown Toole with her husband and daughter, Ona, in 1907.always my mentor.”A teen-age girl could do much worse. Zula Brown Toole not only printed her Miller County Liberal for 36 years, she also started the “Decatur County Advance” which Meadors’ mother ran, and she established the First Baptist Church in Colquitt. Years after she died in 1947 at 78, she was inducted into the Georgia Newspaper Hall of Fame for “outstanding service in the field of newspaper journalism.”Nancy Jones is a longtime Valley rest-dent and historian.
Newspaper Details
Daily News-Record
Harrisonburg, Virginia, US
Wed, Sep 03, 1997
Page 19
Full Page
Clipped by
Tim F.
GA, USA 17 Aug 2020
Other Publications Near Harrisonburg, Virginia
Harrisonburg Republican
Harrisonburg Old Commonwealth
Harrisonburg Evening News
Harrisonburg Daily Independent
Daily News-Record
