Margie Riddle Bearss Dies At Age 80

By Kathryn Jorgensen

ARLINGTON, Va. — Margie Riddle Bearss died Oct. 7 in Brandon, Miss., after a long illness. She was two weeks shy of her 81st birthday.

She grew up in Brandon, was a graduate of Hinds Junior College and Blue Mountain College and taught English in Goodman and Lexington, Miss. She married Edwin Bearss, former park historian at Vicksburg National Military Park, on July 30, 1958. They moved to Arlington, Va., in 1966.

Mrs. Bearss had a lifelong love of books, poetry and Civil War history. Her great-grandfather was in the 9th Alabama. She helped recover, preserve and catalog artifacts from the Union ironclad Cairo, which her husband located and raised from the Yazoo River in 1964. She designed and constructed exhibits at Grand Gulf Military Park.

She wrote Sherman's Forgotten Campaign: The Meridian Expedition (1987) and co-edited two collections of Champion Hill documents, My Dear Wife (2005) and Darwina's Diary (2OO6) with her friend, Rebecca Drake.

While living in Virginia Mrs. Bearss was elected to membership in the Company of Military Historians and named Fellow for her work with the USS Cairo and Grand Gulf Park.

The 2003 book Edwin Cole Bearss: History’s Pied Piper, by John C. Waugh, shared stories and photographs of Margie and Ed Bearss and their family. “Margie: Meeting His Match” told of their courtship.

They met in the library at Vicksburg battlefield where she was researching primary materials on Union Gen. William T. Sherman’s early 1864 march through Mississippi. Ed, then park historian, was on his day off, doing research. “He hadn’t shaved, he looked terrible,” she recalled.

As John Waugh recounts, Ed started visiting Margie, who was teaching 50 miles away, on his days off. His first gift to her was a cannonball and three volumes of the Official Records. Even though she was dating someone and was not interested in Ed they started visiting battlefields.

Their honeymoon was a month-long 10,000-mile trip through all but four of the Western states. Margie became, as Waugh relates, Ed’s editor, proofreader and indexer, a strong supporter of everything he did outside the Park Service (he now is Chief Historian emeritus) and “somebody with whom he could talk for a lifetime about history.”

Phil McCombs of The Washington Post profiled Mrs. Bearss in a 2002 story headlined “Marching in Time to History; Margie Riddle Bearss Is No Footnote to Her Storied Husband's Civil War Studies.” She told him her theory of why Sherman’s tactics changed in Mississippi to scorched-earth warfare. It could have been because of his grief after 9-year-old Willie, who visited with Sherman’s wife and three other children after the fall of Vicksburg, died there of typhoid fever.

In addition to her husband, Mrs. Bearss is survived by their children: Sara Bearss of Richmond, Va.; Edwin Bearss Jr., his wife Annika and son Michael, of Columbus, Ga.; and Jenny Bearss and sons Todd and Andy Olmsted, all of Brandon, Miss.

Memorial donations may be made to the Civil War Preservation Trust, 1331 H St., NW, Suite 1001, Washington, DC 20005.