CEW's first wife - Mary Elizabeth Barrett

C.E.W. Dobbs married Mary Elizabeth Barrett in 1860. He was 20 and she was 18. The Barrett's were a well rooted Virginia family. Her father was George Barrett, a lawyer and Baptist minister and her mother was Mary Foster, a very lively woman from a musical family. The Fosters owned and operated a shipping fleet that carried goods and people across the Atlantic ocean for at least a century.

We don't know too much about Mary Barrett because I have nothing of hers - no letters that she wrote, no diary, and very little said about her in her sons' letters. Last summer, I managed to locate her obituary with the help of a very friendly librarian in Marion, Indiana.

The Evening Courier
Madison, Indiana
July 2, 1884
Entered Into Rest

After a long illness, Mrs. Mary E. Dobbs, wife of Rev. Dr. C.E.W. Dobbs, the pastor of the Vine Street Baptist Church, died at her residence in this city at 12:20 o'clock this morning. Her disease was uterine cancer, which caused insanity the past four months. She was born in Portsmouth, Va., Nov. 1, 1841, and was the youngest child of the Rev. Geo. W. Barrett, a Baptist minister of that city. She was left an orphan when only ten years of age. She became a Christian and united with the Baptist Church at fourteen. July 18, 1860, she was married to Rev. C.E.W. Dobbs, who with seven children, survive. The Dr. and his children have the sincere sympathies of the community in their great affliction. The funeral will occur from the church at nine o'clock tomorrow morning.