Mrs. Mary Wynne Celebrates Her Ninety-seventh Birthday

Beeville Bee, Friday, October 1, 1897

Lacking but three years of a century and as spry and sprightly as a girl of sixteen summers, Mrs. Mary Green Wynne celebrated her ninety-seventy birthday on the 25 of September, 1897, inst. at the residence of her granddaughter, Mrs. F. M. Howard.

Mrs. Wynne was born in the Old Dominion in 1800 and is one of twelve children of B. B. Jackson and Hannah Jackson Tucker, and is thus doubly related to those two famous families, which have been so prominent in the history of the country.

She was married in 1825 to Burwell Malone and immigrated to Alabama, then a pioneer state of the union. Here was born her two sons, the late Col. Frederick J. Malone (6-12-1826--12-5-1891) and Thos. B. Malone, who now at the age of seventy-three is as energetic as a man of thirty. Her husband, Burwell Malone died in 1828 and in 1841 she was again married to Capt. Lewis T. Wynne of Tennessee, who though passed the requisite age, entered the Confederate army at the outbreak of the war and died in the service from natural causes in 1863. From this marriage Capt. Jack Wynne of Wharton County is the only issue. He is now 52 years old. Shortly after the war she moved to Texas, her two sons, the Messrs. Malone, having served in the Mexican War and settled in this state.

Aside from her age, Mrs. Wynne is in all respect a remarkable woman. Contrary from most persons of an advanced age, she lives in the present rather than in the past and remembers names and faces of her ever increasing acquaintance quite as well as those of her younger days and keeps in close touch of with current events. She remembers distinctly incidents of the second war with Great Britain, and to her the politics of the incubation period of this the nation as it exist today is as fresh In her memory as are incidents of the last campaign.

In her earlier days there were no railroads and she made many trips in her carriage from Alabama to Virginia. Even now she frequently drives twenty-five miles in a day in visiting her numerous progeny and spurs any assistance in entering or alighting from her carriage. Not long since when a grandson offered to assist her in his buggy she laughingly said, "Get away, if anyone should see you helping me they may think I am getting old."

In her lifetime more than three generations have passed and among her descendants she has two great-great- grandchildren whom are thus the fourth in line of descent from her. Together they represent five generations. Mrs. Wynne views her age as nothing extraordinary in her family. All of the twelve children of her father lived to an exceeding old age, two of her brothers having passed the century mark.