#81: The Telfair Hospital for Females Near Forsyth Park

“Many an individual leaves this world after a long sojourn in it,

a stranger in the most emphatic sense.”

—Mary Telfair

The Telfair Hospital for Females Near Forsyth Park

She was the last survivor in the Savannah branch of the Telfair family tree. So, the unmarried Mary Telfair focused her efforts on creating a legacy with her family name. She managed to succeed at her task, but it took the intervention of the Supreme Court of the United States to do so.

As Supreme Court Justice Joseph P. Bradley later wrote in the 1879 case Jones v. Habersham: “It is a laudable ambition to wish to transmit one’s name to posterity by deeds of beneficence.” Indeed, it is.

The year after Mary’s death, Justice Bradley had served on the Electoral Commission that decided the disputed election of 1876. The Compromise of 1877 awarded 20 disputed electoral votes to Ohio Republican-candidate Rutherford B. Hayes in return for New York Democratic-candidate Samuel J. Tilden’s acquiescence. In exchange, the Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South, ending reconstruction and amplifying the Jim Crow era. Undoubtedly, Mary would have approved.

Mary Telfair died on June 2, 1875, at the age of 76. She was born to a family with great wealth. Her mother, Sarah Gibbons, was among the wealthiest and most prominent Southern families. Her father, Edward Telfair, became an incredibly successful merchant and influential politician in Georgia. Mary was born in Augusta, then the capital of Georgia, while her father served as the Governor of the state.

Her lawyer was the prominent and Harvard-trained Alexander R. Lawton (see PFS #77). Upon her death, Mary Telfair’s estate was valued at more than $650,000 — a considerable sum in its day. Her will included twenty-three primary bequests. We covered Mary’s meaningful Georgia Historical Society gift (see PFS #26) and her establishment of the Telfair Academy of Arts and Science (see PFS #34).

Mary’s first bequest was tracts of land to her cousin, George Noble Jones. Disappointed in how little his family received, Jones promptly challenged the will by claiming Mary was not of ‘sound and disposing mind’ at the time of her death. A final version of her will had been signed a mere day before her death.

Two years elapsed before the case came to court. Alexander R. Lawton brought in his law partner, General Henry Roots Jackson (see PFS #75), to argue the case. But even with Savannah’s best legal talent, the jury ruled that Mary Telfair was not entirely ‘free of insanity’ when she signed her Will.

The Lawton-Jackson legal powerhouse had lost. Telfair’s attorneys appealed to the Supreme Court of Georgia, which ordered a new trial. But a second jury returned the same verdict.

Ultimately, the United States Supreme Court decided the Mary Telfair case. Attorney Lawton feared the destruction of his professional legacy as the preeminent lawyer in Savannah and worried the loss of this extraordinary case would turn him into a citywide laughing stock. But the United States Supreme Court overruled the state court in Mary Telfair’s favor. It chose to enforce her Will. In the end, Justice Bradley praised the generous wishes expressed through Mary’s Will by writing:

“The millionaire who leaves the world without doing anything for the benefit of society, or for the advancement of science, morality or civilization, turns to dust, and is forgotten; but he who employs a princely fortune in founding institutions for the alleviation of suffering, or the elevation of his race, erects a monument more noble, and generally more effectual to preserve his name, than the pyramids.”

Providing the funds for The Telfair Hospital for Females—painted en Plein air here—was Mary’s most unique legacy. It served the women of Savannah at its Forsyth Park location from 1886 through 1959.