Edna Pope
“It has been a long time since I have confided in you, dear diary,” Edna wrote on March 23, 1893, in an unbound bundle of papers, some of which are taped together in repair. Edna Pope was a student at the Lucy Cobb Institute, a boarding school for white girls in Athens, Georgia, founded in 1859. Letters and their corresponding envelopes and other keepsakes from the Lucy Cobb Institute are glued to the pages of Edna’s diary. Some of the letters are personal notes to her from Mildred Rutherford, thanking her for a Christmas gift and discussing their return to school. Rutherford was a long-time teacher and administrator at the school, and was a major influence on the lives of the students. Rutherford was famously a defender of the confederacy, even decades after the U.S. Civil War.