A Little More in Lattimore (3/26/23)

Bob and I drove a short eight minutes to the little town of Lattimore, North Carolina, to visit their historical museum. It is listed in the visitor’s brochure that we have been working our way through, but it is only open from 12:30 to 2:30 on Sundays and just opened for the year a couple weeks ago.

I just looked up the population of Lattimore, and it was 488 at the time of the 2010 census. The town has a total area of 1 square mile, so there’s no getting lost. Accordingly, the historical museum was very small — one room with some odds and ends from various aspects of their history.

When we first walked in, we thought it would be a very quick stop , but the helpful volunteer gave us some additional information about one of their exhibits and played a 20 minute film for us that will likely ensure that we remember this visit for awhile.

We learned the story of a local woman, Martha Mason, who died in 2009 at the age of 72, after 61 years living in an iron lung due to having contracted polio. She had a brother who was two years older, who died of polio four days before she went into the hospital for the same disease. The film tells her story, but she has also wrote her autobiography. While Martha never recovered , she graduated from Gardner Webb (when it was a 2 year college) and Wake Forest, both at the top of her class. She also ended up learning to use a computer by speaking and wrote her autobiography. She lived on her own after her parents both died with the help of three caregivers.