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Martinsville High School Alumni
| Class of 1944 |
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| Passing of Frances Shackleford Leavitt - 63 |
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03/27/19
Esther Sparks Powell
(1956)
bhpowell36@yahoo.com
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1944 Mavahi classmate Frances Shackelford Leavitt has passed away. Holly Kozelsky wrote a lovely tribute to her in Monday's Martinsville Bulletin. I hope that you will agree with me that it is worthy of being repeated here on the MAVAHI site.
Frances Martin Shackelford Leavitt, a descendant of the Martinsville's medical pioneers, passes away By HOLLY KOZELSKY Holly.kozelsky@martinsvillebulletin.com Mar 25, 2019
A part of Martinsville history is gone with the passing Saturday of Frances Martin Shackelford Leavitt.
Leavitt, who had been an integral part of Martinsville’s cultural scene, was the daughter of Dr. John Armstrong Shackelford and the granddaughter of Dr. Jesse Martin Shackelford, the founder of Martinsville’s first hospital.
The Martinsville-Henry County Historical Society filmed an interview with her for its oral history collection about 10 years ago.
“My name is Frances Shackelford Leavitt, and it’s the only way I can preserve that name — I keep ‘Shackelford' in everything I can,” she said.
She was born in the family home on Church Street on Feb. 8, 1926, she said, and talked about the hospital.
Her grandfather started it in a wing on his house in Irisburg, then moved to Martinsville. After being graduated from the John Hopkins University as a doctor, her father moved back to Martinsville to help him.
“It was a very homey hospital, but they were very up to date,” she said in the interview, adding that her father went to medical conventions every year “to get caught up with the latest” advancements.
The hospital first was operated out of her grandfather’s house, and in 1921 he opened the Shackelford Hospital in a house on Church Street.
In 1946, her grandfather opened Martinsville General Hospital on Starling Avenue (where the Virginia Museum of Natural History now stands), where it operated until Memorial Hospital was opened in 1970, according to information from the Martinsville-Henry County Historical Society.
At home, the family were cared for by a cook, a nanny (“but they weren’t called that then”) and chauffeurs. “It sounds put on, but it wasn’t. It was just accepted” back then, Leavitt said.
She had all her world within a few blocks: Her grandparents lived on Broad Street (“Martinsville had some gorgeous homes. It was a crime they didn’t appreciate them”), and she went to school just a couple of blocks away.
She attended Central Grammar School on Cleveland Avenue where, she recollected, there was a metal tube of a fire escape that ran from the upper floor to below. “You got in it and twirled around. I didn’t do it but one time, and that was enough for me,” she said.
She went to the junior high across the street, and then attended high school in what is now Martinsville Middle School. When “they built that building that is there now, we thought it was the most glamorous thing in the world, and it was,” she said.
She also attended Saint Mary's School in Raleigh, N.C., the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Holton Arms School in Washington, D.C., and Mills College in Oakland, Calif.
She and her husband, Brooks Russell Leavitt, had one daughter, Frances “Frankie” Leavitt Lee of Hillsborough, N.C., and three sons, Brooks Russell Leavitt of Chapel Hill, Dana Hastings Leavitt of Pendleton, S.C., and the late Spencer Shackelford Leavitt.
Leavitt was heavily involved in the area through Martinsville Garden Club, Charity League, Martinsville Literary Club, Piedmont Arts and the Blue Ridge Regional Library.
“Mom didn’t talk much about what she did” in the community, Frankie Lee said, adding that she does remember one project well: the landscaping of the Martinsville Library about 40 years ago. She said she went along many times to watch her mother oversee that work.
“She knew a lot about horticulture,” Lee said.
For about 10 or 15 years, the Leavitts lived in Grassdale, a family home in Spencer. It had “a beautiful orchard in the back yard, full of apple trees. When they were in bloom, underneath them was a field of grape hyacinths and daffodils, just magnificent,” Lee said.
Her mother captured their beauty, and much of nature — including her husband’s and children’s fly-fishing in the Smith River — in her watercolor paintings, she said.
Later the family would live on Corn Tassel Trail and then on Sheridan Court. Leavitt was living at King’s Grant most recently.
She was a lifelong and active member of first Presbyterian Church of Martinsville.
“What meant the most to her was the 125th anniversary of the church” in 1979, Lee said. “They found the original stained glass window … in an old barn.”
That window, which had been in the church’s sanctuary when it was uptown, was installed in the present sanctuary, which is across from Patrick Henry Elementary School.
Virginia King attended church with Leavitt and also knew her through the historical society, of which Leavitt was a lifetime member.
“She was very into preserving her family history,” King said, adding that Leavitt turned a closet of her King’s Grant home into a mini-museum “with items that she had from her father and grandfather.”
King recalled Leavitt as “very gracious, and she thinks everyone is wonderful.”
Leavitt's funeral will be held at 10:30 a.m. Thursday at First Presbyterian Church.
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