Portrait of William Ratcliffe and Etta White from about 1900. William and Etta worked at Pilot Mills in Raleigh, NC and are listed in the 1899-1900 City Directory.
Name / Occupation / Address
William Ratcliff; wks Pilot Mills; r 4 Pilot Mills (cotton mill line inspector?)
Miss Etta R White; wks Pilot Mills; r 4 Pilot Mills (cotton mill weaver)
From the 1900 Census, they live next door to each other.
Etta and William are buried in Oakwood Cemetery and her headstone is the Ratcliffe Angel, guardian of Raleigh’s dead. Read a good article written by Josh Shaffer about the Angel on the N&O website.
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Photo via Flickr @ Ashe Etta White |
"By day, the angel guards the grave of Etta Ratcliffe, who died in 1918 after a sickness that dragged on for five months. Stern-faced, unsmiling, the angel doesn’t gaze so much as glower into the distance – a fitting monument to a mother of five dead at 37."
Read more "here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/10/21/2429070/shaffer-graveyard-angel-glares.html#storylink=cpy
[The angel] came to Raleigh from Italy, ordered by Etta Ratcliffe’s husband and knitting-factory magnate, William. But her ship foundered and sunk off the coast of Wilmington, and the marble angel spent years underwater before a tender-hearted seaman plucked her out of the ocean.
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