Home Experience Independent Director Chief Financial Officer Public Accounting Credentials Education Professional
Designations Affiliations Professional
Organizations Volunteer
Organizations Other Achievements
and Awards Scholarships and Professorships Contact RÉsumÉ (PDF)

Coleman D. Ross

Mary Bess Coleman Endowed Scholarship

The Mary Bess Coleman Endowed Scholarship at Winthrop University was initiated in November 2001 in honor of the 104^th birthday of Mary Bess Coleman (Class of 1918) and in memory of her sisters Isabel Coleman Shellhouse (Class of 1913), Kathleen Coleman (Class of 1917), and Nancy Coleman Ross (Class of 1921). The academic scholarship was established for rising juniors and seniors majoring in elementary education, who have achieved academic excellence, and who have demonstrated financial need. Priority is given to applicants from Fairfield County, South Carolina, and Thornwell Orphanage in Clinton, South Carolina. Winthrop University provided the following about the honoree in an article, Scholarship Honors 104-year-old Alum’s Lifetime of Kindness, in its Spring 2002 Winthrop Magazine.

According to Mary Bess, there are two things worth dedicating your life to: teaching and helping others. Witnessing the altruism she practiced throughout the last 104 years of her life, her nieces and nephews decided to honor her through this scholarship.

Mary Bess remembers experiencing her family's support when her Aunt Chanie Coleman managed to squeeze a group of kids into her car. She was driving Mary Bess, her three sisters, and her cousins from their hometown, Feasterville, SC, to Winnsboro, SC, for a Winthrop scholarship test.

Mary Bess looks back on her life and sees this experience as just one of the many ways her family helped her gain the tools she needed to give back to her community.

Mary Bess started to attain the invaluable tool of an undergraduate education after she and her three sisters were each granted scholarships to attend Winthrop Normal College. Mary Bess achieved her two-year teaching certificate shortly thereafter.

Upon graduating from Winthrop, Mary Bess returned to rural South Carolina to give back to her family and community. She started by caring for her parents and by working as a teacher at Thornwell Orphanage. Later she found a teaching job in the same two-room schoolhouse she attended as a child. Each day she rode a horse to work and, in addition to teaching her K-12 students a variety of subjects, she showed them that their teacher could share in the work of tending the school's wood stove.

With her education and her desire to help others in any way she could, Mary Bess held valuable roles in her community as a teacher, a midwife, and as advocate. When mothers in labor needed assistance, she helped deliver their babies. When tenant farmers became ill, she helped nurse them back to health. And in the 1930s, when residents saw the importance of electricity, she campaigned for its installation in neighborhood homes.

Her primary caregiver and niece, Nancy Jo Ross Smith said, 'She taught second grade at Pleasant Garden School until she retired at 65. Later, when a young family member needed financial help to pay for college, she resumed teaching at Nathaniel Greene School to help pay for the student's tuition. That just shows you the depth of her love and obligation to help her family.'

Mary Bess Coleman Scholarship recipients by academic year include –
2005-06: Brandi Dukes
2008-09: Teryn Dalton
2013-14: Courtney Young
2014-15: Sarah Helms
2015-16: Caroline Cody, Emily Matthews
2018-19: Ashlyn Davis
2019-20: Katrina Herbert Sides
2020-21: Katrina Herbert Sides

( back to the Scholarships and Professorships main page )