Martha Jane Westmoreland (1903-1999)
Martha Jane Westmoreland was born in Old Richmond township, Forsyth County, North Carolina on January 4, 1903, to Samuel Lee Westmoreland and Florida Virginia Stone. She was Florida's fifth child and Samuel Lee's eighth (as he had three children from his previous marriage).
In her early childhood Martha lived with her parents, siblings, and half-siblings in a rural area in Pinnacle, Stokes County, NC. Her father worked at the Spainhour Mill, a gristmill, in Tobaccoville, but died at the age of 40 on December 31, 1908, a few days before Martha's 6th birthday. This left her mother with their many children and pregnant with his tenth child (Mary Minerva Westmoreland). Samuel had been a member of the International Order of Odd Fellows, so to relieve the burden on his widow, all of her children, at various times and ages, entered the I.O.O.F. Children's Home in Goldsboro, in Wayne County.
Martha entered the I.O.O.F. Home in the fall of 1909 and was educated there for twelve years, until her graduation in 1921. At first she was accompanied with sisters Dora, the eldest at 14, and Beulah, then 8; in later years her brother and other sisters would join them. As Martha explained in a letter recalling her experiences at the Home, "Our dear Mother, bless her heart, couldn't part with all of us at one time. She told me one time that if she could have done differently she would rather have had the money and kept her children."
Martha, however, loved the Home and had many happy memories of her time there. In several years, including 1914 and 1915, she took part in touring Concert Classes which performed in communities across North Carolina. Many of her classmates at the Home became her lifelong friends, with whom she corresponded for many years. In 1919, after her three eldest siblings (Dora, Vestal, and Nora) had graduated from the Home, they chipped in and arranged for their mother Florida to move from Tobaccoville to Goldsboro so that she could be closer to her younger children at the Home.
After high school, Martha attended the Durham Business School, from which she graduated in 1925 in the Secretarial Department with a medal in penmanship. In the following years she lived with her mother in Goldsboro and worked for various law firms in town as a stenographer and secretary. In February 1929 the family was devastated by her sister Beulah's unexpected death from influenza.
In 1931, Martha and her siblings financed the construction of a house for their mother at 1103 Evergreen Avenue in Goldsboro, right next door to Martha's older sister, Dora Westmoreland Pike. By December of that year Martha and her sister Ann were living in the new home with their mother. Of the three women, only Martha was employed.
In the fall of 1933, Martha briefly moved to Flushing, Queens, where she worked at a Horn & Hardart pastry shop, before returning to secretarial work in Goldsboro four months later. In 1934, Martha and fellow I.O.O.F. alumnus Lee "Sol" Fulton reorganized the Alumni Society of the I.O.O.F. Children's Home and coordinated a "homecoming" reunion, which became an annual tradition.
In 1936 Martha became the secretary for St. Paul's Methodist Church in Goldsboro, which she had attended since 1912 as a student at the I.O.O.F. Home. As secretary she was heavily involved in every aspect of the management of the church. In a 1983 history of the church, Martha recalled:
"One Monday morning I had a call from... [the] secretary of the Spiritual Life Group... She told me that a red-headed soldier... wanted to meet a nice girl, and she thought of me. I felt flattered. I told her to send him to the church at a certain time. When he arrived he looked like just another lonely soldier boy, and I tried to cheer him up and he cheered me up. This was how I met my husband, Raymond Guy Wooding, a real Connecticut Yankee."
Ray, an instructor at Seymour Johnson Field (the US Army Air Force training center in Goldsboro) proposed soon after, and Martha and Ray were married at St. Paul's on July 4, 1943. The couple subsequently moved to Texas when Ray was transferred to Brooks Airfield in San Antonio.
When he was discharged from the Army, Ray took Martha back to his hometown of North Haven, Connecticut, where in 1946 the couple moved into a small single-story farmhouse that he built for her on Upper State Street. Martha and Ray lived at "Oak Crest Farm" for the rest of their lives. They had no children, but here they grew apples, pressed cider, and grew Christmas trees.
Martha and Ray helped found Faith United Methodist Church in North Haven, where they were both very active members of the congregation. Martha's beloved mother Florida Stone died in Goldsboro in 1963, and over the following years Martha mourned the passing of several of her siblings - Ann in 1966, Vestal in 1967, Dora in 1975 and Nora in 1987. Through the decades Martha remained very active in the Alumni Association of the Goldsboro I.O.O.F. Home and its newsletter and reunions. A vigorous correspondent throughout her life, Martha faithfully kept up with her family via postcards and letters.
After Ray passed away in April 1991, Martha resided alone at Oak Crest Farm in the couple's original farmhouse for the rest of her life, though for a brief period she was joined in North Haven by her younger sister Mary, also a widow, before Mary eventually moved to Sarasota, Florida, where she passed away in 1998. Martha herself died at the age of 96 on September 29, 1999, after a series of strokes. Martha had lived almost 40 years in North Carolina, and more than 50 in Connecticut. The last sibling alive at the time of her death was her younger sister, Minnie Lou Westmoreland Mayberry.
Martha Jane Westmoreland's place in the Westmoreland family tree as it relates to this archive can be seen here.
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