The “Aunts & Uncles” series of biographical sketches are Artificial Intelligence (AI) compiled narratives of selected individuals from my Genealogical database. The selected AI will used the RootsMagic Individual Summary from my Genealogical Software, Roots Magic. All genealogical data is my research material acquired over the past 46 years of research. Today's Web post is a Biography of Martha E. Previtte Eddins (1863-1934) compiled with the assistance of Claude Sonnett 5 Median.
Martha E. Previtte Eddins
5 September 1863 – 21 April 1934
A Daughter of Chesterfield County, South Carolina
A Childhood Amid War's Aftermath
Martha E. Previtte was born on 5 September 1863 in Chesterfield County, South Carolina, the daughter of John Washington Previtte and Elizabeth "Bette" Davis. She arrived in the world at one of the darkest moments in her home county's history. Just eighteen months after her birth, in March 1865, Union troops under General William T. Sherman swept through Chesterfield County on their march north, burning the courthouse, the academy, and most other public buildings in the county seat. The war left the district's records, economy, and countless families in ruins, and it was into this hard Reconstruction-era world that Martha spent her earliest childhood.
Note: the family group sheet's summary line lists Martha's birthplace as Anson County, North Carolina, but every other record in this file — her death certificate, her tombstone as recorded in the Chesterfield County cemetery survey, and her 1934 obituary, which states she "was born in Chesterfield County 71 years ago" — places her birth in Chesterfield County, South Carolina. That is the birthplace reflected above and used throughout this biography.
The Previtte Household
Martha grew up as one of a large family of children born to John Washington Previtte (1824–1913) and Elizabeth "Bette" Davis (1841–1900). The 1870 and 1880 federal censuses of Chesterfield County's Court House township capture the household at two points in Martha's girlhood, though the ages recorded for a few siblings shift slightly between enumerations, as was common in the era:
By 1880, seventeen-year-old Martha was living in her father's farming household in Chesterfield County alongside seven brothers and sisters, from William, the eldest, down to two-year-old Emma, the baby of the family.
Marriage to William Washington Eddins
In 1882, Martha married William Washington Eddins (born 3 September 1863 or 1864, per various records, in Chesterfield County), the son of Joseph Columbus Eddins Sr. (1828–1894) and Matilda Ann Tice (1832–1910). A family note on this record states the marriage lasted eighteen years and produced five children, four of whom were living — matching exactly what the 1900 census recorded for the young couple.
The newlyweds settled in Chesterfield County, South Carolina, where William farmed and the couple began raising their family. Over the following two decades, the Eddins household would move northward across the state line into Anson County, North Carolina, following a path many rural Carolina Piedmont families took as they sought new land and opportunity.
Children of William and Martha Eddins
Martha and William welcomed five children between 1888 and 1898. Their firstborn, an infant daughter, lived only a single day; the four who survived to adulthood went on to marry and raise families of their own across the Carolinas and Virginia.
The 1900 census found the Eddins family still in Chesterfield County at the Court House township, with William, 37, and Martha, also listed as 37, married eighteen years with five children born and four living — Fannie, Ila, Henry, and William Benjamin, ranging from age eleven down to age two.
By 1910, the family had relocated to Morven, in Anson County, North Carolina, where the census taker recorded William and Martha as having been married twenty-seven years. Ten years later, in 1920, they were enumerated in Wadesboro, the Anson County seat — a bustling cotton and textile town that had drawn national attention in 1900 when scientists from across the United States and Europe traveled there to observe a total solar eclipse. By the time the Eddins family arrived, Wadesboro was home to cotton mills, hosiery plants, and a growing Main Street, part of the broader cotton-driven prosperity that shaped rural Piedmont Carolina life in the early twentieth century.
Only their youngest son, William Benjamin, remained at home with his parents by 1920; the older children had grown, married, and begun households of their own.
Losing William
William Washington Eddins died on 20 May 1924 in Anson County, North Carolina, at about age sixty. He was buried the following day at Zoar United Methodist Church Cemetery back in Chesterfield County, South Carolina — the same church family cemetery that had anchored the Previtte and Eddins families for generations. Martha, then sixty years old, was left a widow in Wadesboro, though family remained close: the 1930 census found her, at age sixty-six, living in the Wadesboro household of her youngest son, William Benjamin Eddins, his wife Jessie, and their children — no longer the head of her own household, but still very much at the center of the family.
Final Years and Passing
Martha Previtte Eddins died on 21 April 1934 in Wadesboro, Anson County, North Carolina, at the age of seventy. Her death certificate lists the cause as chronic Bright's disease — the common nineteenth- and early twentieth-century name for what is understood today as chronic kidney disease, a slow-progressing illness that was a leading cause of death among older Americans before modern treatments existed. She was buried two days later, on 23 April 1934, at Zoar United Methodist Church Cemetery in Chesterfield County, South Carolina, beside her husband.
Her obituary, published in The Messenger and Intelligencer of Wadesboro on 26 April 1934, remembered her warmly: an excellent Christian woman who had belonged to Zoar Church since girlhood, a good neighbor with a large circle of friends, and a mother survived by two sons and two daughters. "Many funeral designs," the paper noted, "showed the esteem in which she was held."
A Life Framed by Change
| Historical Timeline — 1863 to 1934 1863 — Martha born in Chesterfield County, SC, in the midst of the Civil War 1865 — Sherman's army burns Chesterfield County's public buildings; Reconstruction begins 1882 — Martha marries William Washington Eddins 1888 — Birth and death of their first child, an infant daughter 1889–1898 — Fannie, Ila, Henry, and William Benjamin born c. 1905–1910 — Family relocates from Chesterfield County, SC, to Anson County, NC 1917–1918 — World War I and the influenza pandemic sweep the country 1920 — Nineteenth Amendment grants women the right to vote; family enumerated in Wadesboro, NC 1924 — William Washington Eddins dies; Martha becomes a widow 1929 — Onset of the Great Depression 1934 — Martha dies in Wadesboro and is laid to rest beside William at Zoar Church |
Martha Previtte Eddins's seventy years spanned an extraordinary stretch of American history — from a childhood shadowed by the Civil War's final campaigns and Reconstruction's hardships, through the rise of the New South's cotton economy, the First World War, women's suffrage, and into the opening years of the Great Depression. Through all of it, she remained rooted in the two things that framed her life from beginning to end: the Previtte and Eddins families of the Carolina Pee Dee and Piedmont, and Zoar United Methodist Church, where she was laid to rest beside the husband she had married more than half a century before.
Martha E. Previtte is my Great Grandaunt.
Sources
This biography is drawn from the Family Group Sheet compiled by Charles Purvis (5 September 2026), including U.S. federal census records (1870, 1880, 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930), North Carolina Death Certificates for William W. Eddins and Martha Privatt Eddins, Find A Grave memorials #47277353 and #47277397, the obituary of Mrs. W. W. Eddins published in The Messenger and Intelligencer (26 April 1934), the Chesterfield County, South Carolina Cemetery Survey (James C. Pigg, 1995), and related family and military records as cited therein. General historical context on Chesterfield County and Anson County/Wadesboro history is drawn from published county histories and historical marker records.
Prepared by Charles Purvis • CPurvis1@gmail.com
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