Mary Jane was a remarkable woman. Prof. Austin Wheeler Smith had this to say about her:
"Mary Jane George was married at the age of eighteen to Robert Keene Stephens, a man of forty-eight, and of considerable wealth. She was beautiful, intelligent and extremely forceful, cunning and independent, and evidently had married for money. She and her husband were not compatible, perhaps for several reasons. She refused to conform to the social conventions of her day and soon became "notorious." She could out wit judge, lawyers, and jury. Dame Gossip, doubtless, scandalized her for conduct quite in the bounds of propriety today. By reason of her superior intellect and wit she became boss of Woodbury and Cannon County, Tennessee. She accumulated considerable wealth and did about as she pleased regardless of what people said.
"During the Civil War she mounted a horse and carried forty or fifty slaves they owned to Mississippi for safe keeping, but in the end lost them. I fear that the mantle of charity is not big enough to cover her acts of impropriety. She had no children by her second or third marriage. Her second marriage seemed to have resulted from a bet that she could not "hook" Judge James Tarpley of Lebanon." |
