Earnhardt, Mae Matilda

Class of 1918

Birth: 25 Nov 1899, Rowan County, North Carolina
Death: 22 Dec 1964, Charlotte, Mecklenburg County, North Carolina

Parents:
Lewis Dodson Earnhardt (1873-1946)
Nannie Mae Sink Earnhardt (1879-1960)

Spouse: John Ralph Wingard (1897-1986)
Married: 25 Nov 1927, Rowan County, North Carolina

Children:
Ruth Matilda Wingard Sensenbrenner (1928-2021)
John Ralph Wingard Jr. (1930-2023)
Edward Earl Wingard (1934-)
James Harold Wingard (1933-2016)
Ruby Mae Wingard Harriman (1936-2015)

Burial:
Saint John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church Cemetery
Concord, Cabarrus County, North Carolina

Source: www.findagrave.com, #143991086.

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Notes from granddaughter Anna Mae Sensenbrenner Quackenbush, 20-21 Nov 2023.

My Grandmother was a remarkable woman and I loved her dearly. She taught school for a number of years after graduating. Primarily, I know she taught in the one room school house at St. John’s Lutheran in Concord, NC. I grew up on the farm my Grandfather, John Ralph Wingard, purchased in Union County, NC with the money he had earned as a Master Mason in construction of the Duke University Chapel.

Gram instilled a great love of literature in me. One of my most prized possessions is her Moroccan leather bound copy of The Complete Shakespeare. She read to me often from it and I, too, love the Bard. In February, 2006, I worked as an assistant in costuming for The Royal Shakespeare Company while they were in residence at Davidson College. At the end their month-long residency each member of the cast and crew sign their names into the fly sheets of that book.

Gram also taught me to sew. By the time I was 5, I would happily sit beside her baisting seams which she would quickly run through her Singer sewing machine. Little did she know that mending and ironing would put me in a position to attend upon the gods of the English theater world the year I turned 50. I was but nine when she died and her death was as forceful as an astroid hitting my small, beautiful, solitary childhood world. Such a little bit of time and yet I learned so much from her…

…My Grandfather, John Ralph Wingard attended there [Mount Pleasant Collegiate Institute]. But Daddy Ralph, as all his grandchildren called him, left to join the army during WWI. I know that my grandparents first met there. They had a protracted courtship.

I  have reason to believe that Gram fell in love with another young man she met during her years at the Seminary. He went on to become a doctor. After completing medical school he went to Hawaii. I know they maintained a correspondence, but it came to naught. My mother had actually found the letters after Gram’s death. Mother became more free with these details in the last years of her life. She told me that the young man wanted Gram to marry him, but he wanted them to live in Hawaii. Gram feared she would never see her family again if she left the Continental US.
Another interesting story Mother told me was about the Flu Pandemic in 1918-19. Gram was teaching at St. John’s Lutheran when a man arrived at the school with a team of horses and a buckboard. He told her that both her parents and her much younger sisters were deathly ill with the flu and there was no one to care for them, so stricken was the community. After dismissing her students, she climbed aboard the wagon and was taken back to her home in East Spencer. There she successfully nursed them all through the crisis and she herself never succumbed to the flu. After she married Daddy Ralph in 1927, she never professionally taught again to my knowledge.
She was a master gardener of both flowers and vegetables. I have always carried heirloom bulbs, seeds, and iris from her original gardens. One that I love most is a German Bearded iris that was one of the first commercially traded iris. it is named ‘Gay Parasol’. It is a prolific bloomer and I have them all over the lot.
Because we had our own home on the farm, I was with my grandmother everyday from the moment of my birth until her death. I do not ever remember eating breakfast at my own house, not when Gram has fresh biscuits and molasses on the table.
At one point some years ago I was talking about the birds on the farm and I asked Mother about the birds with red eyes that Daddy Ralph had in a pen between the garage and his black smithy. She and my father were both shocked I could remember those details. They told me the birds were pheasants which Daddy Ralph raised for only one year, 1957. I was just 18 months old that autumn. They were raised to provide for landowners who wanted them for hunts. He would later raise quail for the same purpose…
…Gram died of cancer on Dec. 22, 1964. I was eight, turning nine on February fifth of the next year. Mother wanted to get the funeral over with before Christmas, so it was held just two days later at Christ Lutheran Church in Charlotte, NC where my parents and grandparents were charter members. It was a cold, wet Christmas Eve. Gram is buried at St. John’s. We went back to the farm, near Waxhaw, long enough to get a bite to eat and change clothes to return to church for the Candlelight Service. Mother, a Lenoir Rhyne graduate, was Director of Christian Education and Daddy was a tenor soloist in the choir. Since that time I have had a very complicated relationship with Christmas…
…My younger son, David and his wife, Megan, already the parents of my much loved grandson, Palmer, are expecting a daughter…due on Dec. 26th. I believe that through my maternal line she may become the 7th generation of college educated women in our family….and that all began at Mount Amoena.

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Kannapolis Daily Independent (Kannapolis, NC), 23 Dec 1964, p. 5.

Mrs. Wingard

CONCORD – Mrs. Mae Earnhardt Wingard, 65, of Route 3, Waxaw, died Tuesday at a Charlotte hospital.

Funeral services will be conducted Thursday at 2 p.m. at Christ Lutheran Church, Charlotte, of which she was a member. The Rev. Jacob L. Lackey and the Rev. Fred Ramseur will officiate. Interment will follow in the St. John’s Lutheran Church Cemetery near here. The body will be taken from Hartsell’s in Concord to the home today at 4 p.m. and will lie in state at the church half an hour prior to the rites.

Mrs. Wingard was a native of Rowan County, daughter of the late Lewis D. Earnhardt and Mrs. Nannie Sink Earnhardt.

Surviving are her husband, John Ralph Wingard Sr.; three sons, J. Ralph Wingard, Jr., James H. Wingard and E. Earl Wingard, all of the home; two daughters, Mrs. William Sensenbrenner of Waxaw and Mrs. James Harriman of Winston-Salem; three sisters, Mrs. J. B. Cornelius Jr., of Salisbury, Mrs. James Ritchie of Draper and Mrs. Maynard McGee of Palmyra, N. Y.; four grandchildren.