Within a space of eight days, Oct. 28 to Nov. 5, Fayette County’s citizens and this newspaper lost two remarkable women. Sallie Satterthwaite died at her daughter’s home in Virginia and Carolyn Cary died in hospital in Fayetteville.
Both wrote thousands of words for this newspaper, beginning with its first issues in early 1993. Both were volunteers from the days when Fayette needed volunteers because it couldn’t afford to pay otherwise. Sallie had a Peachtree City fire station named in her honor, and Carolyn had been proclaimed the official historian of Fayette County by the County Commission in the early 1980s.
Even with multi-million-dollar government budgets, we could not afford to pay them now for what they have meant to this county over decades.
Sallie wrote until Parkinson’s disease took that from her about five years ago. Carolyn wrote up until last month, when she fell in her home, suffered a broken hip and was hospitalized.
Sallie wrote personal columns and Carolyn wrote columns about Fayette’s history. One of each from 20 years ago appears in this issue of The Citizen.
It would be worth your time to search our online archives for the names of Satterthwaite and Cary and to dip into the riches awaiting you. A caveat: Although the paper started in February 1993 and our first online edition appeared in November 1996, our digital archives extend only back to the summer of 1998. Earlier columns by them exist only in bound copies from 1993 through 1998 at the Fayette County Library in Fayetteville.
A sample of one of Carolyn’s history columns can be found here. A column from Sallie is here.
They will be missed!