Special Collections Receives The Marion Floyd Leach ’43 Army Wives and Women’s Military Memoir Collection
This past fall, Special Collections was the recipient of a bequest, first made several decades ago, of a collection of books written by American women whose husbands were military officers. Collected over several decades by Marion Floyd Leach ’43, a self-described “army wife” and alumna who was married to a Brigadier General, Leach and her husband retired from a long and well-traveled Army career to Beaufort, South Carolina. After Leach’s death early in 2017, the collection came to Furman, where it is currently being cataloged. Highlights include several nineteenth-century memoirs and campaign histories by Elizabeth Custer, a rare first edition (1906) of Mary Boykin Chesnut’s A Diary From Dixie, a number of mid-twentieth century etiquette books for army wives, and several nineteenth-century books about women who were combatants and spies. This collection adds excellent depth to our growing women’s history collections.
