Ethel Warren Spruill

News Obituary Article

SANDY SPRINGS: Ethel Warren Spruill, history buff, embodied a bygone South

By HOLLY CRENSHAW

Ethel Spruill might have felt a tad overwhelmed when she married widower Stephen Thomas Spruill.

After all, when she exchanged vows in 1933 with the prosperous DeKalb County landowner, he was in his 60s and she was in her 20s.

When the new bride moved into his picturesque farmhouse on Ashford Dunwoody Road, his children were older than she was.

Plus, there was the job of helping to manage the vast swath of land owned by her husband, whose family had settled in the area in the 19th century.

But Mrs. Spruill didn't flinch.

"She loved her husband and was trying to embrace his family and his way of life," said her niece Nita Willard of Mableton. "And he was not moving. His life was his property, where he was. His family was all in Dunwoody."

When he died in 1967 at the age of 97, Mrs. Spruill's late husband owned 1,200 acres of cow pastures and cotton fields north of Atlanta. Much of it is occupied now by Perimeter Mall, Perimeter Center and other monuments to modern suburbia.

Then there was the white frame farmhouse where Mrs. Spruill cooked corn bread and vegetables for farm hands and baked mincemeat pies and coconut cakes for holiday visitors.

In 1991, she and her stepdaughter Onnie Mae Spruill, now deceased, decided to donate the restored 1860s house, along with its outbuildings and surrounding 5 1/2 acres of land, to the North Arts Center.

The former farmhouse was reinvented as a gallery and after it opened in 1993, the center was renamed the Spruill Center for the Arts.

Now, her niece said, "the house really stands out because it's surrounded by a Houston's next door and shopping centers all around.

"She realized that unless she did something like this, the house would more than likely be torn down."

The funeral for Ethel Warren Spruill is 2 p.m. today at Dunwoody United Methodist Church. Mrs. Spruill, 99, died Monday at her Sandy Springs residence. Sandy Springs Chapel Funeral Directors is in charge of arrangements.

Mrs. Spruill was a pack rat and history buff who funneled some of her memories into a book she co-authored, "The Story of Dunwoody."

She lived without electricity until World War II and would dress up in period costume to talk to elementary school children about canning vegetables and putting up preserves, which she did into her 80s.

Sandra Bennett of Dunwoody, Spruill Center's coordinator for special events, said in some ways Mrs. Spruill embodied a bygone South, yet "she was bright, inquisitive, sophisticated." She was well-read, enjoyed opera and other cultural events and showed up at the gallery for fund-raising events.

At the Spruill Gallery, a five-minute videotape of Mrs. Spruill's reminiscences plays for visitors. In it, she talks about ringing a dinner bell to call field hands for their noontime meal and watching mule wagons headed for supplies down a dusty, rock Ashford Dunwoody Road.

"It's beautiful," she says in the tape, as she looks around the gallery. "Coming back to the old homeplace brings back many happy memories.

"She was so tickled by the gallery," Ms. Bennett said. "She'd usually bring some of her lady friends and they would make a day of it. And then the ladies would go to lunch."

Mrs. Spruill would escort her friends through the current art exhibit, then walk them through her former home and share details of her farmhouse life.

"She was so proud of the contribution she made," Ms. Bennett said, "and that the name would be carried on."

There are no immediate survivors.

© 2007 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution