Frances Moore Webb Bumpass (September 29, 1819 – May 8, 1898; sometimes written as Bumpas), was a newspaper publisher and educator in North Carolina. She published the Weekly Message for twenty years, including through most of the American Civil War, and helped organize the Women's Foreign Mission Society of the Methodist Church.
Early life Frances Moore Webb was born in Halifax, Virginia, and raised in Person County, North Carolina, the daughter of Isaac Webb and Harriet Dickens Webb.'Historical Papers of the North Carolina Conference Historical Society and the Western North Carolina Conference Historical Society (1925): 33. She was part of the extended Webb family in Person County that included educator William R. Webb.Finding aid, Webb Family Papers, 1795-1960, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She studied to be a teacher by learning Latin and Greek as a young woman.Paula S. Jordan, "Frances Webb Bumpass" Dictionary of North Carolina Biography (UNC Press 1979).
Career As a young clergyman's wife, she moved often, and taught as possible to supplement the family income. In 1847 she settled more permanently in Greensboro, North Carolina. In 1852, the widowed Mrs. Bumpass took over publishing the Weekly Message, a newspaper her husband had begun. She remained the publisher of the Weekly Message for twenty years,Jonathan Daniel Wells, The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861 (University of North Carolina Press 2005): 125-127. and published regularly through the Civil War years, except during a period of Federal occupation in 1865.Elizabeth Fox Genovese and Eugene Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview (Cambridge University Press 2005): 389. Her elder daughter Eugenia Harriet Bumpass helped with the paper, and taught at Greensboro Female College."Eugenia H. Bumpass, 1860" Greensboro College.
In 1872, she closed the Weekly Message and started a small school in her home.Rev. N. H. D. Wilson, "A Noble Woman: The Name of Mrs. Frances M. Bumpas Leads All the Rest" Raleigh News & Observer (August 13, 1905): 2. via Newspapers.com She helped to organize and promote the Women's Foreign Mission Society of the Methodist Church in her last years. She exhorted women in the church to action, saying "Sisters, we have tarried too long. Each of us owes it to herself, in this favored age, to rise to the noblest possibilities of our nation."U. S. Department of the Interior, National Register of Historic Places, Nomination Form, Bumpas-Troy House.
Personal life
Frances Webb married Methodist minister Sidney D. Bumpass (or Bumpas) in 1842, when she was 23. They had four children, daughters Duella and Eugenia Harriet, and sons Robah (who became a Methodist minister like his father)Carl Fowler Price, "Rev. Robah Fidus Bumpas" Who's Who in American Methodism (E. B. Treat 1916): 31. and Terrelius (who died in childhood, during the same attack of typhoid fever as his father).Mrs. M. T. Plyler, "Three Notable Women of North Carolina Methodism: Frances Moore Bumpas" North Carolina Christian Advocate (March 12, 1914): 4. via Newspapers.com She was widowed in 1851. She died in 1898, and the following year her autobiography was published by the Southern Methodist Church.
Her papers are part of the Bumpas Family Papers at the Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.Bumpas Family Papers, 1838-1972, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill NC.
The Bumpas-Troy House in College Hill, Greensboro, North Carolina, built in 1847 for Frances and Sidney Bumpass and the site of the publishing office of the Weekly Message, is now an inn on the National Register of Historic Places.
References
External links The Bumpas-Troy House on LandmarkHunter.com Her gravesite in Greensboro, at FindaGrave.