Mrs. Margaretta Ellen Wise Mayo, widow of William C. Mayo, died about 5 o'clock yesterday afternoon at the home of her son-in-law, Dr. W.T. Oppenhimer, 106 North Ninth Street, from the effects of a stroke of paralysis, which she suffered about 11 o'clock yesterday morning. Arrangements for the funeral have not yet been made.
Mrs. Mayo is survived by five children- Henry Wise Mayo, of New York; Mrs. W.T. Oppenhimer, and Mrs. St. Julien Oppenhimer, of Richmond; Mrs. Richard Parker Crenshaw, of Havana, and Mrs. James Brandt Latimer, of Chicago.
Mrs. Mayo was born on September 25, 1844, in Rio de Janeiro, to which court her father had been accredited by President Tyler. She was the youngest daughter of Henry A. Wise. Her mother, Sarah Sargent, was a daughter of Hon. John Sargent, the eminent lawyer and statesman of Philadelphia.
When only a child Mrs Mayo came to the United States with her father, living first on the Eastern Shore of Virginia at her father's home, "Onley-Near-Onancock", and later at Rolleston, near Norfolk. In 1856, after her father had achieved his memorable triumph over the Knownothing party, she came to Richmond to live in the Governor's Mansion.
Scarcely had her father gone out of office, when the stormy period of the Civil War followed. During the war the capital of the Confederacy was the centre of as brilliant a social life as America has ever known, and in this Mrs. Mayo was a prominent figure. Cooper de Leon, writing of that day, referred to her as "a marked belle of war-time Richmond", whose "wit made her a centre of attraction".
In January, 1870, she married the late William Carrington Mayo, and had made her home in Richmond ever since.
