Williams, Mary Lyde Hicks

By Claude H. Moore, 1996

27 Apr. 1866–17 Jan. 1959

Mary Lyde Hicks Williams, artist, was born in Faison, the daughter of Captain Lewis (Company E, Twentieth North Carolina Regiment, Confederate States of America) and Rachel McIver Hicks. She was a direct descendant of Captain Thomas Hicks, a member of the First, Second, and Third Provincial Congresses and of Henry Faison (1744–88), a soldier of the American Revolution.

Mary Lyde Hicks attended private schools in Faison and was graduated from St. Mary's Junior College in Raleigh. She then studied art and portrait painting in Washington, D.C., and New York. During her lifetime she painted more than five hundred portraits, many of them of political and military leaders. She also did a collection of paintings of Black Americans that later were given to the North Carolina Museum of History.

Mrs. Williams helped organize the Faison-Hicks Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and from 1912 to 1914 was president of the North Carolina division. For several years she served on the board of the state hospital in Raleigh, and she filled several terms on the State Democratic executive committee.

On 13 Feb. 1889 she married Marshal McDiarmid Williams (1867–1939) of Cumberland County. They moved to Faison and lived in the antebellum home of her granduncle, Isham Faison, which she later inherited. The Williamses had four sons: Lieutenant Commander Lewis Hicks (1890–1931), U.S. Navy; Isham Roland (1891–1959), attorney; Major Marshal McDiarmid (1893–1935), U.S. Army; and Virginius Faison (1895–1977), attorney.

Mrs. Williams, a Presbyterian, was buried in the Faison Town Cemetery.