Armistead, Mary
Birth
Death
First Name
Last Name
Married Name
PersonID
Note
Name in Index
Person Biography
Mary Armistead was born in 1802 to Robert Armistead III and Lucinda Margaret Ellzey in Loudoun County. On 5 April 1827, Armistead married Willis Pope in Madison County, Alabama. They had four children. She died in 1841 at the age of thirty-nine or forty.
Following Mary Armistead’s mother’s death in 1804, Mary and her sister Elizabeth became beneficiaries of a trust set up by their father. Robert Armistead gave enslaved people to the girls in this trust, solidifying both their financial security and their social status during Mary’s childhood. Their trustee was Mary’s first cousin, Armistead T. Mason. As children, Mary and Elizabeth Armistead received education from a woman named Mrs. Scott who ran an academy in Leesburg.
During the period when the sisters lived in Virginia, Armistead Mason hired out their enslaved people to generate income for their support. One of these enslaved men, John Tebbs, was hired out, imprisoned for attempted escape, and sold out of the sisters’ estate for $385 in 1813, not long after he was recaptured. Another enslaved man whose name appears in Robert Armistead’s 1805 deed of trust, Joe, successfully ran away in 1817.
Mary Armistead does not appear in the Mason family manuscript account book after the year 1819. Like many other Virginians seeking new opportunities in the Deep South, Mary and her sister, Elizabeth, moved to the new state of Alabama shortly after this time. Elizabeth married native Virginian John McKinley in Madison County, Alabama, in 1824. Mary’s life is undocumented until 1827, when the twenty-five-year-old married thirty-nine-year-old Willis Pope Sr., also in Madison County. Willis was a son of LeRoy Pope, one of the founders of Huntsville, Alabama. Like McKinley and the Armisteads, the Popes lived in Virginia before moving south.
Willis and Mary Pope moved to Florence, Alabama, sometime before 1841, probably to run a tavern. The Pope’s Tavern historic site, renamed for Willis’s father after its restoration, still stands in Florence, although it is not the same structure Mary knew. Mary Armistead Pope died in Florence, Alabama, on 29 March 1841. Her husband’s tavern burned down nine months later on New Year’s Eve 1841.
By Odessa Lamborn
