Person:Mary Claiborne (13)

The Claibornes had temporarily moved from Arlington, Shelby County, Tennessee to be close to family in Haywood County, due to hard times and their mother, Adelaide's, deteriorating health. Elizabeth was the child "chosen" by Adelaide to carry on the church missionary work Adelaide could no longer do. Elizabeth attended a private school in Memphis and taught in the Shelby County public schools until 1903, when she entered Scarritt Bible and Training School.

After graduation from Scarritt, she was accepted by the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church South. She spent twenty years teaching in the science department of the McIntyire School in Shanghai. She advanced her studies with courses at Tsing-hwa College in Peking and at the Medical School at Shanghai, and conducted research in botany with "Chinese" Wilson and Dean McGregor. In 1925, she was appointed to the Nge Kar Ang School in Soochow, China. The Peking Riots spread and with the massacre of the Nan-King missionaries, she returned home.

After a year of deputation work with the Women's Missionary Council, she was appointed to the Board of Missions of the General Division. From 1930 until the late 1940s, she was also a professional landscape architect in Nashville and wrote the book A Manual of Gardening, while continuing her missionary work. In 1939, she became a staff member of the Women's Division of the Board of Missions and Church Missionary Council in New York City.

She retired to Millersburg, Kentucky, and then (as age and health limited her) to a retirement home in Nashville. Just before her death, she had decided to plant a garden on the grounds and fell, becoming bedridden. She died unmarried and is buried in the Scarritt College plot, Graceland, of Woodlawn Memorial Cemetery in Nashville.

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3} Find A Grave.

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